For many of us, the personal data we have stored on our computer is irreplaceable.* If not irreplaceable then it's at least* very difficult and time consuming to replace.* After all, you can’t go back and take more photos of your wedding, or your last birthday party.However, personal data goes way beyond the stuff you store in Documents, Music and other standard folders.* It includes all those bookmarks you’ve got in Safari (or your favourite web browser), it includes all the contacts you have in your Address Book, it includes all the email you’ve received (and sent).
Having a good backup process gives you peace of mind that, when the worst happens, you're already prepared.
If you’re aiming to minimise your angst when the time comes where you need your backups, you have to be prepared ahead of time.* Once things start to go wrong, you may not have much time to save the situation.
Misconceptions:
“No problem”, I hear you say, “I keep all my personal data on my external hard drive”.
Here is the first principle of backups:
If you only have your personal data in one place, it isn’t a backup.
It doesn’t matter if that one place is the internal hard drive in your computer, an external hard drive, USB pen drives, DVD’s, or written down in a diary.* If there’s only one copy then you can lose it just through having whatever it’s stored on failing.
Alrighty, so we’re agreed that personal data needs to live in at least two places.
“That’s easy, I back up my computer to an external hard drive once a week with CCC!”
That’s great!* It’s a really good start.* Here comes the second principle backups:
A manual backup isn't as good as an automated backup.
If your backups are done automatically, they’ll get done.* If your backups are done manually, they might get done unless it’s inconvenient, or you’re busy that day, or you got distracted and went to the pub instead, or you forgot to connect the hard drive, or you were working to a deadline and didn’t want to take time out to wait for a backup to happen.
Any backup is better than no backup at all, but a backup that relies on you actually doing something to make it happen is far less likely to be truly useful than one that happens automatically and regularly.
“I don’t need a backup, all my data is on a NAS and that’s using RAID!”
...and on to the third principle of backups.
RAID is not a backup.
RAID is a fantastic technology.* As long as you’re dealing with a RAID level that includes redundancy (so, not RAID 0), it lets you keep working even though you’ve just had a hard drive fail.* It means that if you have a hard drive fail, you don’t lose the data on that drive.
When you look at this situation it’s easy to see why it could be mistaken for a backup.* You don’t lose data when hardware fails.
The problem is that this isn’t the only way that data can be lost.* Lets say you accidentally delete a thousand photos.* The fact that those photos were stored on a RAID system isn’t going to mean that you can get them back.* However, if your RAID system is backed up, you can indeed recover them.* Not from the RAID but from your backups.
In short, RAID helps you stay up and running when hardware fails.* A backup, though, is what you need when you lose data.* RAID can’t stop you losing data except in that one specific situation.
A Good Backup System:
So, now that we’ve looked at some common misconceptions with backups, how do we implement a good backup system?
What follows are some considerations for building a really robust backup system.* Some of these steps won’t be for everyone.* It’s up to you to decide what your data is worth and, from that, figure out how many of these considerations you’ll take into account in your own situation.
Types of backups
NASA is reported as having a considerable body of data from early space missions in the 1960’s that’s now all but unusable because the tape drives needed to read the data aren’t available anymore.
If you have your data on CD-R discs and drives capable of reading CD-R cease to be available then how do you read your data?* This goes both ways though.* What if all your data is on BluRay discs and your BluRay drive fails?* You won’t be able to access that data until you replace your BluRay drive.
A good rule of thumb here is to make sure that you have backups on different types of media - keep some backups on DVD’s and others on external hard drives or online with a cloud storage system.
For complete backups using different media types may not be practical, but for really critical data (e.g. scans of important documents, home contents database for insurance use, etc) it’s really worth looking at making sure you have this information available in different forms.
Location of backups
You’ve got your backups on external hard drive and you’re making backups automatically.* Sitting beside your computer is a nice little pile of external hard drives that hold all your backups.* What happens if your home (or office) burns down?* Not only do you lose your computer, you lose the backups as well.
If all your backups are in one place, and it’s the same place as your computer, you still can’t feel safe.* You need to take at least one of your backups somewhere else.* That way a fire (or some other disaster) won’t destroy your data and all your backups at the same time.
Number of backups
We’ve already seen that you need your data in at least two places or you don’t have a backup.* But what happens if you’re part way through a backup to your external hard drive and it fails?* Or the backup doesn't finish properly and you don’t notice?* In either case, you no longer have your data in two places.* The rule of thumb here is that you should never overwrite your only backup in case something goes wrong.
As a result, having your original data and one backup isn’t enough.* You need more copies of your backup.* How many?* For most people, you should have at least three copies of your personal data aside from the original copy on your computer.
How do I get to three?
If your backups are automatic, you’ll need one backup connected to your computer ready for the next backup.
Because you never over-write your only backup, you now need two backups.
If you’re going to take your backup somewhere else, you need a “transit copy” so you’ve always got one backup offsite and one backup with your computer as well as the backup that’s being taken elsewhere.* That takes you to three backups.
Is three enough?* That’s up to you.* With three backups there’s going to be times where you have no backup connected to your computer or no backup at your offsite location.
What software
Every current model Apple computer includes Time Machine.* This application will automatically back up your computer to a hard drive connected to your computer, to a TimeCapsule device or, with appropriate additional configurations (and with some limitations) to a non-Apple network connected hard drive.
Because it’s fully automated it makes for a great backup.* However, it’s difficult to use multiple Time Machine backups on different external hard drives and rotate them.
Software like CCC and Disk Utility will let you create backups but they aren’t done automatically.* You have to manually create the backup and they’ll work best if you aren’t booted from your normal internal hard drive on your Mac.* Because of these factors, this isn’t the ideal solution either.
A popular option is SuperDuper which ticks many boxes for being able to be automated and so on.* While a free version is available, you’ll need to purchase the full version to get the scheduling (and other) capabilities.
A Suggestion:
You'll need:
- One large external hard drive (1TB or greater) with either FireWire or USB (depending on what your Mac supports) or a TimeCapsule.
- Three external hard drives each big enough to keep one complete copy of the contents of your Apple's internal hard drive (e.g. if you have a 500GB hard drive in your Mac, get 500GB external hard drives).
- The commercial (i.e. paid-for) version of SuperDuper
- An account with DropBox, MobileMe or some other cloud storage service.
Use Time Machine for your primary day-to-day backup to the large external hard drive.* Using Time Machine you have a quick “oops recovery” when you accidentally delete or over-write an important file.
Set up SuperDuper to back up to your three external hard drives on a schedule.* You should look at backing up like this at least once a week.* As you'll be taking one of these hard drives offsite, do the backup the night before you normally go to the offsite location.* Then you can disconnect the hard drive with the latest backup, connect the next backup drive (that you've already got ready to use) and immediately take your latest backup offsite.* While you're offsite dropping off your latest backup, you pick up the other hard drive that's there and bring it back.
Finally, configure your cloud storage service to back up the really important stuff that you absolutely can't afford to lose.* As with the other backups, this should happen completely automatically.
One More Thing...
There’s no point in making backups if you aren’t making sure that your backups work.* Get into the habit of going into Time Machine a few times a week and checking that you can restore a few files from backup.* Load your SuperDuper (or CCC, or Disk Utility) backups and extract some files, make sure you can boot from the disk image (if being able to do that is important to you).
There’s nothing worse than having gone to all the trouble of setting up a Time Machine backup, weekly backups to external hard drives, taking backups offsite only to find, when you really need to restore some personal data, that your backups are corrupted or aren’t readable.
If you want to seek true backup enlightenment then study the ways of the Tao of Backup.
David Freeman is an Apple Certified Macintosh Technician and the proprietor of Outback Queensland Internet (aka Leading Edge Computers Longreach).* He has worked as a technician for over fifteen years and been involved in computers and the Internet since 1988 when he purchased his first computer (an Amiga 1000).
Backup Strategies and Choices