|
There are a ton of different strategies for backing up your data. What you do depends largely on what you are trying to accomplish, and what your tolerance for risk is. Remember, your hard drive will die one day, and you’ll be stranded unless you have a backup.
Originally, I was going to try to come up with an exhaustive set of guidelines for backup. But as I’ve researched more and more, I’ve decided that is just about impossible. So instead, I will lay out a number of strategies that I am in the process of implementing, along with the rationale for them. At the end of the article, I’ll give you some links to go for more information. It should be noted that all of the computers I’m working on backing up are Macs. The software mentioned is Mac-based, but the principles still apply. I’m not a Windows guy, so I don’t have much experience with Windows backup software. I’ll give you some links at the end, and maybe Daniel will chime in on with a comment with his experience (Daniel is the Windows Yin to my Mac Yang)
Strategy #1: My MacBook Pro
I’ve been meaning to get my MBP backed up for a while now, but the point was driven home a few weeks ago. I was rushing through airport security theater at O’Hare, trying to fit all my earthly possessions into 3 gray trays. The line was moving fast, and I pushed the trays around the corner and the one containing my Mac (now outside of my backpack for “security” reasons) crashed to the ground. Thankfully, it emerged unscathed. But the point was taken; I have a big chunk of my life on there and recreating it from scratch would be darn near impossible.
What I’ve done for the MacBook Pro is to pick up a 500 Gig quad interface drive from OtherWorld Computing. I partitioned it off into a 150 Gig and about a 350 Gig (it’s less due to formatting losses). The 150 is a full, bootable backup made by Carbon Copy Cloner. The 350 Gig is a Time Machine target for incremental backups.
It could be argued that this is redundant, because Time Machine backups are also full backups (unless you tell them not to be) and you can restore your entire drive from them if need be. However, doing that requires getting a new drive (or a new computer if that’s the case), booting from the OS DVD, and copying all the files to the new drive. That takes a good hour or two (I’m backing up 87 Gigs right now).
With a full, bootable backup, I can plug that drive into any computer that will run OS 10.5 and go back to work. No time wasted. This would be sufficient really, but because I have Time Machine, I use it. Time Machine is a defense against a file getting accidentally erased or corrupted. Since it runs every hour, it’s essentially on-line backup. I have Carbon Copy Clonerset to run an incremental backup (replacing only what’s changed) every Tuesday morning at 10:30 when I head into my creative meeting.
|
