We all spend so much time on these dorky projects that we love so much. I personally have sacrificed time, money, girlfriends, and personal hygiene all for some little blue board that can blink an LED once a second. Some of us do it for fun and others have dreams of creating the next million dollar idea. It takes a long time to write and debug a complicated program, not to mention all the time spent learning the language and the basics of electronics. I wrote a sketch that was over 2000 lines in the main program alone. Not to mention 4 libraries i studied and modified to fit my needs, learning AT commands for a Tellit GM-862, and learning the basics of electronics. And i started completely from scratch, a year ago i couldn't tell you the difference between a resistor and a pcb. Last night some piece of **** that's too lazy to get a job, broke into my truck and stole my laptop with my sketch on it. 9 months and WELL OVER 1000 hours of hard work down the drain. Ironically it's an alarm system i installed in my jobsite trailer that's full of tools. (should've built one for the truck too) So how would YOU put a price on YOUR blood, sweat, tears that go into a project? I want to hear from everyone!! <------------------ And PS - never put more than 2 exclamation points in a row into your sketch, it will drive you completely insane! ]
Time for local backups - get a Passport hard drive and copy your stuff onto it at least occassionally.
Value - hard to say. Doubt you will get much besides the value of a replacement laptop if you put in a claim tho.
I have older sketches backed up.
Not really looking for an insurance claims quote, more a a general poll on how everyone values there time.
Dropbox provides 2gb of online storage for free. Not only does it provide you a way to keep files synced across computers, but it serves double duty as a remote backup of any of the files you have on it. Your entire house with all your posessions could burn to the ground, and you still have all your dropbox data.
2gb not enough? gmail provides another 7gb of storage, though not quite as convenient as it requires you email yourself any files you want stored.
As for the effort I put in this particular hobby, most of what I've learned is part of my job being an Engineer.
On the plus side, it shouldn't take 1000 hours to replicate what you lost, since they certainly didn't steal all of the knowledge you've accumulated from that 1000 hours of blood, sweat, and tears. Plus, you hopefully learned from this experience that you should have everything backed up, and remote backups can provide an additional layer of security in case of a a catastrophic home event, ie fire, explosion, government confiscation, spousal tornados, hungry dogs, meteor strikes, etc.
That really sucks!
To me, my sketch is worth whatever it does for me -- learning, utility, whatever.
To someone in the market, the sketch is worth whatever they're willing to pay. For an insurance claim, the sketch is probably not worth more than, say, the college notebook for a student.
Btw: I have lost data over the years, and started becoming very careful with backup. I've set them up to be automatic, to back up both on-site (to a machine that's always on) and off-site (to a service like idrive.com), and to store data on a mirrored hard disk, so one disk failure doesn't lose the data.
(daily backup of my code, documents and email, sometimes more than once a day, one on 2nd partition (as a quick undelete) , one on memory stick of 8GB (which I take with me), one on a RAID server)
A project that took 1000 hours of learning fiddling and BS&T, can most often be rebuild in one fifth or less of the time from scratch because after 1000 hours you should know how it should be done properly. (posting parts of your sketches on the forum / playground article is also a form of backup)
What is it worth? No thief can take away the fun I had ... only the fun I would have today (or maybe a few days longer if the insurrance doesn't coorporate :).
Email your source to yourself daily
I use a free online SVN/Git/CVS for important stuff, and also backup to an external hard drive once in a while.