Backing up. Not just for the Paranoid
2:24AM, January 29, 2007 - [ Permalink]
Backing up your important files doesn't always seem like a fun way to spend free time. I do it now because a few years back, I lost a pile of data to a hard drive failure that I couldn't afford to have recovered, and ever since, I've become considerably more careful about protecting my data.Hard drive reliability has come a long way in the last decade. Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) has soared to (generally) nearly a million hours. Impressive sounding, considering I am just over 300,000 hours old. While catastrophic hard drive failure is not as likely anymore as it used to be with the possible exception of Maxtor drives, there are many other ways you can loose your data.
The topic of backing up data comes up fairly often these days, and I am regularly asked how I do it, so I decided writing an article to describe the details how I run my back ups might save me some time in the future.
I am a Mac user, but you Windows folk don't have to feel shunned - I'm pretty sure most of this advice can be of use for you too.
There are plenty of nifty applications out there to run back ups. I use Synk 6.0 Standard because that was the application I was pointed to by a friend, and it works nicely for me.
The Set up:
Main computer (PowerMac G5), two internal drives, the system drive (Macintosh HD) and a second drive (Scratch) that serves as local back up and as my local video scratch disk.
Three 2.5" 60 to 80 GB hard drives in small USB enclosures - Backup 1, Backup 2, and Photos & Tunes (cleverly named, I know). At any time, one of the Backup drives will be in the safe deposit box at a close-by bank, as well as the Photos & Tunes drive.
The procedure:
The Local backup:
This is a daily backup that when I am done working for the day, I open Synk Standard and run the selection for the local back up, which runs and then puts the machine to sleep. This primarily acts as insurance against accidental deletions and drive failure. For now, I prefer to do it myself, but eventually, I'll schedule it to run in the background.
The weekly external backup:
I run the back up of my wife's Mac mini to Scratch and once that is complete, I zip up her Documents, Library, and Desktop folders. This boils down to a file nearly 10 GB in size, and gets copied to whichever backup drive is here (1 or 2).
Then I back up (again using Synk) the Documents, Library, and Desktop folders of my computer to the Backup drive. Also have a separate backup that runs that gets the photos and music added since the last time I backed up the photo and music collection (see next section).
Once all this is complete I bring the Back up drive with me when I am out running errands so I can exchange it with the other Back Up drive in the bank's vault.
Photos and Music Collection:
This back up is run usually every three months - at the beginning of January, April, August and November. Ideally, there would be two drives for for this - to keep one in the safe deposit box at all times - this may happen eventually. My entire iTunes collection (~25 GB) and my photo collection (~30 GB) gets backed up to the drive and is returned to the safe deposit box.
Encryption:
Both of the Back Up drives are actually encrypted using Apple's Disk Image AES-128 Encryption technology. One of the reasons I do this is if for some reason I can't make it to the bank, I can just bring the drive with me or drop it off at a friends.
After the drive is formatted, go in to Disk Utility, look at the free space on the drive, and click New Image and select the external drive to create the image on. You can (under Format) select Sparse Disk Image, which will expand the size of the disk image as needed, or pick a size equal to the size of your hard drive - but this will take a while to create. Be certain to save the password somewhere safe, otherwise your data is toast.
Summary
The message I am trying to send is that backing up is easy (although a little time consuming). How you go about backing up your data does not really matter as long as you do start to back up your data.
All of this won't save my data if an asteroid (or comet, if you prefer) smashes into town, but I somehow think that I won't care unless I have some warning and can grab my backup drives and head for the hills. ;-)
Perhaps the hardest thing here is to make your offsite back ups part of your weekly routine, but once you get that worked out, the rest is pretty easy. In my case, the drives are exchanged on Friday mornings before I head off to the pub where I use the wi-fi to have a work-out-of-the-home-office day.
Almost certainly, I'm at the far end of paranoid when it comes to my data, but I am self employed and have to ensure my business wouldn't be ruined by a hard drive failure (or worse). This happens to people with unfortunate regularity. Don't let it be you.
