Mac-Techs.com

Oooh, love the title!

Okay, a topic near and dear to my heart. What’s up with backups? My experience is few do it right, and those who do have a backup haven’t really thought through their strategy to its logical consequences. Hey, nothing like a global call on millions of computer users.

Here’s what I think a lot of people do nowadays. It’s a good strategy, not a great one. They perch an external drive on their desk and via USB or a Firewire connection, copy their files onto the external drive.

Since we’re talking Macs here I’ll mostly focus on that platform but its worth noting in passing some of the aspects that are universal for computer systems, and which are not.

Macs can boot from an external drive, so making a full copy of your drive is doable and relatively easy to do with freeware programs like Carbon Copy Pro. You set the source, your internal HD, the destination, the external drive, and let ‘er rip. The external drive becomes a bit for bit duplicate of the internal drive. If the internal fails, set your system to boot from the external drive, reboot, and your back in business.

PC’s cannot start from an external drive, but they have some other alternatives for creating disk images of a boot drive like Norton Ghost. A typical PC scenario in a hard disk crash would be to install a new HD, then use Ghost to restore the disk image to the new drive.

The gotchas in the one disk duplicate scenario are as follows. Have you tested your external boot scenario and know that it works? The new Intel Macs have to format a drive in a new format in order to boot from them. Is your external drive formatted correctly?

Also, your backup is only up to date the last time you did it. When was that, and how much work will you lose if you have to revert to your backup? Some people do their backup daily, some weekly, some monthly and some on some haphazard schedule based on lunar cycles and Dodger games.

A disc duplicate is way better than no backup, so I always recommend that as a first step. The most common thing that happens is a disk meltdown or failure, so having a backup is pretty critical. Not having one means you’re betting on losing your data at some point guaranteed.

Another gotcha…if a meteor came through your ceiling and neatly took out your computer and your external drive, what would you do? This is the disaster scenario and it’s something you have to plan for. Burglary, flood, fire, kids on the rampage, who knows? What would you do if your computer and backup drive were totally unavailable to you?

Second step in the backup scenario is off-site backup. An easy method to do this is have two external drives, keep one somewhere else and swap the two periodically. The gotcha about losing work still applies but if you’re diligent about backing up locally, you’re covered. If you have a disaster, well you will lose the files you worked on up to the last time you swapped your drives. If that’s weeks, or even worse, months, at least you still have the bulk of your data.

With the advent of widespread broadband, there’s another option, online backup services. Backjack is one for Macs specifically. Mozy is cross-platform, and Amazon S3 using Jungle Disk software is another great alternative. The basic idea is to upload your data in the background to some remote server. It’s encrypted and password protected.

I use Amazon S3 cloud services. While a bit more technical than the consumer-oriented Mozy or Backjack, Amazon S3 has some cool attributes. It’s dirt cheap for one, and you can store files there to be hosted for other uses, like video file hosting for example. Let’s move on.

So, you’ve got your local copy, and you’ve got your off-site backup either on a HD or on a backup service. That’s pretty decent. But let’s make it even easier.

Let’s say you have one big, external HD for backup. Internal HD’s are typically in the 100 to 300 gig range. If you are a typical user, your backup data is around 10-50 gigs of data. Power users can accumulate much more and that may be reason to have a more complex strategy. For our purposes let’s keep it relatively simple.

Let’s take our big external drive, maybe 500 gigs, and split it into two volumes using Disk Utility. One becomes our container for the daily duplicate. The other becomes the Time Machine volume.

Time Machine is a service in OS X 10.5 Leopard which works in the background to backup files to an Time Machine volume. This backup is an archive backup, meaning you can find files and folders going backwards in time that have been deleted, changed, or renamed. The interface to recover files is a visual spectacle, and in Apple’s design-centric philosophy, very easy to use.

Now we have the best of all possible worlds. Local duplicates so we can immediately boot our machine from an external HD. This can be useful for diagnosing and repairing our internal HD as well.

We have an Internet backup for under $5/month which is a typical price. This is our disaster scenario and in my own backup to Amazon S3, I backup the contents of my Home directory only. Why bother backing up the OS files and folders when you would be reinstalling all that anyway.

Then we also have a Time Machine volume operating in the background. If I want to recover that file or folder I accidentally trashed, Time Machine makes it easy and quick to do so.

Okay, meteor, bring it on (not!). And if somehow that critical file goes missing, I can always sacrifice my Vista laptop to appease the gods who will magically recreate the file….yeah, better check that backup again.