I’m always in search of the easiest, most dependable and redundant backup solution. A while back I wrote about my backup script solution for Windows XP (and how it broke in Vista…sigh). It involved using XCOPY32 and Windows Scheduler, as well as a few backup drives for redundancy.
Since I’ve now moved over to the Mac completely (OK, I still run Visio in a VMWare Fusion window…), I’ve had to craft a new backup solution.
Once again, my backup wants/needs – and I assume most peoples’ are similar – are:
- Automated: I don’t want to have to *do things* to back up my data. It’s gotta be set-and-forget.
- Redundant: No single points of failure please. And while I’m at it, I’d like off-site backup in case the house burns down.
- Trustworthy: I need to have faith that my backups are happening and that I can recover from any size disaster, ranging from “oh crap I didn’t mean to delete that file” to “whoah, my hard drive just died.”
Unfortunately, I haven’t satisfied all of these wants and needs with my little scheme. And frankly I’d love some advice from readers on how to do it better. But here’s what I’m doing:
- Cloning my MBP’s hard drive to an external 250GB 2.5″ HDD with Carbon Copy Cloner. It’s got a neat scripting capability so everytime I plug in that drive, it clones my lappy’s hard drive. Unfortunately, it’s not automated. I have to remember to plug in that drive…and some days do go by when I forget. And I’d really love to suppress the dialog that asks me whether I want to proceed or skip the operation. Maybe that setting is there. Hey, it’s free, and it seems trustworthy. Can’t argue with that.
- Setting Time Machine to back up hourly. It’s backing up to a 500GB NAS drive, so when I tire of wandering around the house with my laptop and plug it back into the KVM and Ethernet cable on my desk, I’m assured of getting a Time Machine backup kicked off sometime soon.
- Using Apple Backup to copy “critical” data to my iDisk.? I stumbled upon Apple Backup while looking for a file synchronization tool that would work with iDisk, which I want to use for offsite backup.
Apple Backup / iDisk is quite frankly is the weak link in my backup plan. The big problems with Apple Backup and iDisk?
- On iDisk I’m limited to 10GB (unless I buy more capacity of course), and like most people I have much more data than that, if you include pictures, vids, and music. So I’ve decided to use it for work files only. Which still takes up about 5-6GB.
- Apple Backup is as slow as molasses over the Interwebs.
- Frankly, I’m not sure I trust it. It seems to be backing everything up to a compressed file rather than just replicating my files and folders on the target drive. Which means that if I ever need to recover files, I’ll need to learn & use AB’s restore feature. I haven’t played with it yet, so I don’t know how well it works. In my 18+ years of compy experience however, I’ve come to learn that the bigger a compressed file is, the more likely it is to be corrupted. And AB makes some seriously ginormous files.
- It also doesn’t seem to support synchronization. AFAIK it’s happily chewing up space on my iDisk, without even making differential backups.
So there you have it, my halfway decent backup scheme. It ain’t pretty, and the offsite part is seriously hokey. Any better recommendations out there?
