As the title says how do you protect your sanity and your data from loss and what do you do to keep that data safe from wandering eyes.
My current setup is as follows.
My PCs backup with time machine every hour (rsync on linux and windows with cygwin) to my home NAS (2TBx12 Raid Z2 running FreeNAS) every hour and have daily and monthly backups as well this includes my OwnCloud (Https+VLAN+Only Proxy bound IP from within VPN can access) Sync folder which syncs between the computers as well. All my computers are connected to a private VPN (Soft-Ether node that supports native L2TP/IPSec on Windows Mac Android and iOS) that has nodes in Dallas Seattle New Ohio and the EU All of my syncing and data accessing have to be within the local network, on the VPN or proxy to access any of my data. Every night my NAS will connect through my VPN to a backup server (8x4TB Raid 6) that does nightly (for one month) and monthly backups. On my local network I have a very good hardware firewall that only allows registered IPs to make connections.
Anything that I have thats actually "Important" I keep on a flash drive locked down with truecrypt.
Everything else is expendable, and I could not care less who saw it. I dont save Creditcard information. I don't even use a bank. I use prepaid debit cards. So I really dont have things to hide.
I used to exaggerate my evaluation of what data was really important enough to back up. Now I make sure the little that truly is, is backed up to something offline from the system. Better not for instance to have your important stuff anywhere where any user has write access on a regular basis, regardless of where that system might be located.
There's barely anything worth backing up here. No personal files, maybe some pictures but they are on my phone and on dropbox already so meh.
The most annoying thing when installing a new windows or reinstalling it, is losing all savegames because of the retarded way games save their data. Especially if you pirate them. Cryptic folders, AppData crap, whathaveyou. I absolutely hate software that thinks AppData is a great place to store actual data and settings. Back when games and software still saved their shit in their own folders, I installed apps and games on different partition than my windows partition due to having to reinstall windows every couple of months thanks to the performance creep it used to have (xp) and cleaning it took longer than reinstalling it. Sadly software makers decided I should be punished for this and decided to put everything (in some cases even game DLC, what the...) in folders on the windows partition (unless you bothered to move your user folders to a different one).
Before that most apps and all games just worked with their correct settings (and savegames) after reinstalling windows, without having to reinstall every app and game (some required some registry things so not all software was capable of not needing an install). Since, it has become a pain. This also highly discourages dualbooting different windows versions. I could switch between 2k and xp and just continue the same game from where I left off, ah good times.
It's not that I can't backup savegames now, but the way windows is these days, and how software vendors are doing things these days, it's a lot more hassle than it used to, and I find it barely worth it. Refusal to go with a vastly inferior way of doing things is also a reason.