More and more, everything I create, read, photograph, record, listen to and entertain myself with is sitting on a computer. All of these things are data, data that I need to earn a living and have some fun, which is stored on hard drives, mechanical devices that will inevitably fail. Yet I sleep at night with the confidence that I’ll never lose that data. And you should too.
Why bother?
The safest backup strategy requires more than one copy of all important items, stored in more than one location. What follows is about the simplest, cheapest means (that I can think of) for you individual Mac users to virtually eliminate the chance of losing important data or precious time on the day when your hard drive goes to hell (and takes all your documents, photos, music and videos with it).
I’m going to describe my generic best case scenario. Feel free to adapt it to your work and lifestyle. Even if you don’t adopt every part of this plan, any part of it is better than doing nothing. So, do something. Unless you want to end up one of the funny (take a vacation in other peoples’ misery) stories I like to tell friends and clients who don’t backup.
The reason you want a recent backup of everything important, in two different places, is to cover your butt. Even if the worst (earthquake, fire, hurricane, building collapses, theft, confiscation, alien zap-ray) happens in one place, a more or less complete set of your data remains intact, elsewhere. Redundant backup also protects when either of those drives dies.
What you need
Therefore, you should buy no less than two generously size hard drives. If you can only afford one, get started with that. And buy the second one as soon as you can. The good news is, they keep getting cheaper and more capacious, so time is on your budget’s side.
Where you keep these hard drives depends, in part, on the type of computers you use, and where you use them. If you carry a laptop back and forth between the office and home, you should probably keep one backup drive in each location. If you have a desktop computer in the office, it may make sense to carry an alternating backup drive along on your daily commute. If you’re on the road for days and weeks at a time, one compact backup drive should travel with you. You do the math. Work out a arrangement to (1) keep one backup drive with you in each place you usually use your computer(s), but (2) make sure you never have all you original and backup drives in the same place at the same time. Obviously, having every copy together in your basement office when the pipes burst is not a good plan.
I mentioned the drives should hold a lot. As of this writing, you can buy name brand hard drives with a capacity of 1 TB (1 terabyte aka 1000 gigabytes) for close to $100. If you shop around and do the math on what you’re paying, you’ll discover that lower capacity drives actually cost more per gigabyte. So most folks might as well buy (at least) a 1 TB drive. (Exception: small 2.5” pocket-size hard drives, so easy to carry with you, hold less and cost more.)
What you do
My preferred scheme is to partition at least one of these drives into 3 separate volumes. Assuming you start with an empty drive, you can do this easily using Apple’s Disk Utility (inside the Utilities folder, which is inside the Applications folder, on your Mac). [control][click] on your primary hard drive (the one where you keep all your important stuff) and “Get Info” to see it’s capacity. Then create 2 partitions, each of that size, on your backup drive. All the remaining space (ideally, over half of the backup drive) should go to the third partition.
You’ll use the first two partitions to store exact duplicates of your primary hard drive (made with a disk cloning application like SuperDuper), and the third for incremental backups (performed by the TimeMachine feature built into Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard). The following headings could also be the names of these volumes. Name them whatever you like, as long as you remember their respective roles.
Daily Dupe
Every night, when you’re done using your computer, connect the backup drive to your computer (if it isn’t already), and use the application SuperDuper to duplicate your computer’s primary hard drive to the Daily Dupe volume. At home you could do this at bedtime; in the office, just before you leave.
Tomorrow, if your internal hard drive or you computer fail, you’ll have an exact duplicate of that entire hard drive stored here, with all your latest work, newest files, current preferences and favorite applications preserved.
Let your computer do some work for you, while you’re sleeping!
Weekly Dupe
Once a week (maybe Friday evening or over the weekend, while you’re doing something fun and don’t need your computer), use SuperDuper to duplicate your computer’s internal hard drive to the Weekly Dupe volume.
In this way you’ll now have two backup copies of your hard drive. Even if one of these “clones” duplicated a screwed up version of your hard drive, you have another one, which is no more than a week out of date.
Let your computer do some work for you, while you’re enjoying your weekend! (Or while you do some other weekend chore.)
Constant Backup
You may have noticed by now, when you connect a new hard drive to your Mac (that is, any Mac running Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard or later), a dialog box appears asking if you’d like to use that drive for TimeMachine. Go ahead and set TimeMachine to use the Constant Backup volume. Thereafter, leave the backup drive connected to your Mac as often as practical. (With a desktop computer, like the iMac, MacPro or MacMini, this should be just about all the time. With a laptop, it may only be practical when you’re sitting at a desk or table for a while.)
With TimeMachine properly setup and the backup drive connected, your Mac will quietly backup your work automatically, so you don’t have to remember to do anything (except saving your work, as you go, like you usually do).
Why are you doing all this?
When trouble strikes, TimeMachine is the tool to save your butt, if you accidentally deleted, overwrote or undesirably modified one or more documents or other items on your Mac. TimeMachine lets you “step back in time” and look at earlier and earlier versions of the item, until you find a good one, and restore it to how it was.
Whereas, SuperDuper will be your salvation if the whole, or a major part, of your primary drive gets messed up. You can use SuperDuper to “clone” the last duplicate onto a new replacement hard drive, putting everything back exactly the way it was, in the time it takes to transfer from one hard drive to another. If disaster strikes while you’re working under deadline, you can even boot your computer (or a similar Mac), from a duplicate volume, getting you back to work in minutes.
Offsite Backup
You’ve noticed, I didn’t say exactly how you should configure and use the second backup drive. It’s purpose is to assure that you always have one backup in a different location from your computer. It could be setup like the first, or maybe only for duplicates or only for incremental backups. It really depends on your particular circumstances, when and where and how you work, as well as when and where the computer sits idle. What matters is that, somehow, you alternative backups between the two drives, so your recent files are stored in two different locations. How recent? Think back to the last thing you saved on your computer that you can’t stand to lose. That’s the last time you should have backed up. Proceed accordingly, or risk suffering proportionally. I hate to be vague like that, but your situation and needs are not exactly the same as everyone else’s.
<begin pitch> If you’d like help setting up a backup system tailored to your particular needs — or to teach about, consult on, assist with or just handle any other geekery — please consider contacting me. I can make your computing experiences easier and more productive, less problematic, even (dare I say) fun. Let me know how I can help you. <end pitch>
Or just take the above advice to heart, and sleep sound at night, knowing that your latest project, the photos of your family, and all that music you’ve collected in iTunes, are redundantly backed up, safe from natural disasters and the stupid mistakes we all occasionally make. One day, you’ll thank yourself.
