I’ve finally joined one of the smallest clubs in the world — the “I back up my data reliably, redundantly and automatically” club. It’s a good membership to have. It offers peace of mind, and protection against accidental data deletion. Here’s how it works.
My local hard drive
The hard drive on my MacBook Pro is 160GB. My home directory, minus my “Downloads” folder, is about 70GB.
Step one: Time Machine
“Backup for the rest of us”
Time Machine is one of OS X Leopard’s most useful features. It’s hassle-free backup for non-geeks. I do an hourly snapshot of the entire hard drive (minus my “Downloads” folder and minus any cache directories). Although technically a Time Machine backup could be used to restore my data in the event of a hard drive failure, this is not what I use it for. I primarily use it so that I can revert to older versions of a file or “undelete” something that I didn’t mean to get rid of. This is because Time Machine backups are not bootable, and take a long time to restore. My Time Machine hard drive is 500GB and it is slightly more than half full.
Time Machine recommendations: exclude directories where big files are often changing, or your backups will churn. That’s why my “Downloads” directory is omitted. A lot of big files live there temporarily.
Step two: SuperDuper
“Heroic system recovery for mere mortals”
SuperDuper costs $27.95 and is worth every penny. It functions as a hard drive cloner. Every night at 5:30am, it clones my hard drive to an external hard drive of the same size (160GB). I have it set up to do a “smart update backup” which means that it only updates files that have changed (so it only takes about an hour). Why do I do this when I have an hourly Time Machine backup? Because it creates a bootable backup. Here is what would happen if my hard drive failed: I’d restart, hold down Option-Command-Shift-Delete as it booted, and then select the external SuperDuper backup drive as my boot device. That’d get me going with my system as it existed as of 5:30am that morning. I could then access TimeMachine backups to access the files I’ve been working on, and that’d get me back to within one hour. I’d be back up and working in about 5 minutes, and I’d only lose (at most) an hour of work. That gives me a lot of peace of mind.
Step three: JungleDisk
“My house burned down, now what?”
JungleDisk is my safety net in case my laptop hard drive and both my backup drives crash, are stolen or are destroyed. JungleDisk is an online backup tool that interfaces with Amazon’s S3 storage service. You pay $20.00 for the JungleDisk software, and then you pay Amazon $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used, and $0.10 per GB of data uploaded. I have JungleDisk back up my home directory (minus Downloads and minus cache directories — about 70GB) every night at 4am. I pay anywhere from $15 to $30 a month (to Amazon). Restoring from S3 would be a long, horrid task. I hope I never have to do it. This is strictly my safety net in case of a catastrophe. This is so that I don’t die running into my burning house in order to try to save my data.
So there are three components. All of them operate automatically. This is critical. A backup system that relies on human memory is no backup system at all.
How do you back up? If you don’t, what is stopping you?
Mark says
Chronosync backs up the contents of my Home directory from the mini to an external 500gb drive every night. It’s mainly for music and photos as that is the machine they come out of the camera to.
I have some files in getdropbox but they are few (Infocom mainly because I lost the CD once and don’t want to repeat the loss).
And I also have every photo that actually matters in Smugmug.
But your work needs are specialised enough to warrant the level you have which is indeed impressive.
Bryan Villarin says
I need a drive larger than my main one (500GB), a Drobo, and at the rate I’m taking photos, a 1 TB drive. For now, I need to utilize my 300GB external drive with SyncBack (or something) until then.
I’m at least running JungleDisk and backing up important documents faithfully, but I’ve got nothing setup for my photos. *gasp*
Ryan Boren says
Time Machine for backing up all machines. Laptops back up to a Time Capsule and workstations to attached external drives. Jungle Disk for backing up documents and media. Some documents end up in Gmail and Google Docs as well. Much of my day-to-day work ends up in remote subversion repositories. I don’t do anything like SuperDuper. If something crashes I can switch to another machine and be back to work within an hour. svn up and go. Grab any docs I need right there and then from Jungle Disk Plus, Gmail, Google Docs.
Dan says
Windows here. Cobian backs up across my machines, each one holding copies of the other’s My Documents. They are then all synced via Foldershare to my sister’s PC 15 miles away.
richard kelly says
when it comes to online backups, it’s not cheaper is better. it become more a matter of the “human” element. a tool is only as effective as the operator. i use a company whom has been in the remote backup business for nearly a decade and the quality of their technicians is unbelievable. Remote Data Backups saved my business literally. I had a disgruntled employee whom sabatoged my File Maker Pro database which is critical to my business and I’m not a technical guy. Their support people walked me through the entire restore process and got me back on my feet within an hour. I would strongly suggest that if you consider these guys.
John Bachir says
Time Machine, and then every couple months, I clone to a hard drive in a safety deposit box.
Ryan says
What if your house burns down at 4.05AM, when the backup is in progress? 😉
Mark says
Heh! The online backup keeps old versions of files. To be really safe, I could have alternating nightly online backups.