Comments on: Backup, Backup, Backup

By: c.l. ball

c.l. ball — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 23:35:40 +0000

I think I’ve wasted too much time looking up all the neat stuff Kieran listed in that article.

For Mac users there is the free (donation requested) Carbon Copy Cloner, which is supported by its makers. It is very good for a clone of your drive.

Beware of WD’s My Books as HDs if you are a Mac user; some models will not produce clones via CCC.

By: trane

trane — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 21:23:10 +0000

Thank you very much for the advice… which I should have listened to two months ago when my Mac crashed completely and irreperably (the IT man at work sent it to a firm that specialises in data reconstruction, but there was nothing they could do).

So my PhD dissertation…
…
..
.

And I learned my lesson.
Anyway, I have now bought a socalled Time Capsule from Apple. Seems to work fine.

By: Jacob Christensen

Jacob Christensen — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 12:20:20 +0000

For local back-up on OSX, TimeMachine is lovely (I reconstructed a crashed harddisk last week with the help of TM) – but it fails the second criterion: keep non-local copies of your data.

Backing-up the full contents of my harddisk to ~~dotmac~~ imMobileMe would probably send most ISPs into a rage. Here’s to hoping that nuclear war will not happen.

By: nick s

nick s — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 07:24:58 +0000

I like the JWZ way.

I don’t follow it—I basically have a Heath Robinson backup system—but I like it.

By: Watson Aname

Watson Aname — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 04:04:55 +0000

Addendum to 25: I looked it up, it is not the version of rsync shipping with OS X, but rather more recent source versions that seem to have (finally) sorted out the issues with extensions. This requires new flags, too. If none of that made obvious sense to you, best avoid relying on rsync, I expect. The ditto command works as advertized, and preserves resource forks.

By: rea

rea — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 03:04:02 +0000

I didn’t understand more than about 20% of the post. Oddly, I somehow make my living using a computer.

By: Watson Aname

Watson Aname — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 01:09:47 +0000

Nick, as I understand it recent versions of rsync (as installed by default on OS X) copy the resource forks etc. just fine. It certainly isn’t as user friendly as Super Duper, though.

By: Nick Caldwell

Nick Caldwell — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 23:48:12 +0000

SuperDuper is able to copy more of the hidden magic in an HFS+ file system than any other method (possibly including Time Machine, which is a slightly different use case anyway). So the other free alternatives aren’t quite as Mac-friendly as it.

By: MattF

MattF — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 22:42:09 +0000

Didn’t know that you could boot from a USB drive—so that’s one less technicality to worry about.

As it happens, all the computers I use in my day job have fully versioned, automatic networked backup—so my professional backup needs are taken care of automagically. Backing up my personal stuff, I admit, is less systematic—but there’s at least a copy of everything ‘collectable’ on separate media as well as the SuperDuper clone.

By: MarkUp

MarkUp — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 22:34:20 +0000

Multiple mega sudo ditto’s have a tendency to throw most folks in to a world they’d rather not be in even if they can just copy/paste it all.

By: Watson Aname

Watson Aname — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 22:17:40 +0000

MattF: You can boot from USB, too. It’s worth reiterating that having a bootable mirror of your drive is great, but it’s a pretty lousy backup strategy all by itself.

You want something incremental also, at least for data that is volatile. Kieran makes a good point that using version control on your working files (highly recommended for other reasons as well) often reduces the need for incremental backups.

Super Duper is good. It’s completely replaceable with free tools (rsync, time machine) but that doesn’t do you much good if you won’t use rsync .. and SuperDuper is very easy to use.

By: MarkUp

MarkUp — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 21:53:05 +0000

‘’which don’t have a firewire port.’’

USB is bootable for a while now. A word of reminder to any that rely solely on online backup solutions. Remember the dot.com bubble bust, oh and the Alamo.

As W might put it, ” see… I uh, what you need is a road map, with a road map you can find your way…”

Plan, then implement.

By: David

David — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 21:43:42 +0000

SuperDuper deserves all the praise it gets. Worth every penny.

By: MattF

MattF — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 21:21:46 +0000

SuperDuper is great—by default it creates a bootable duplicate of your hard disk— so, if you back up to a firewire HD, you’re all set… um, unless you get one of the new Macbooks, which don’t have a firewire port.

By: Steven

Steven — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 21:08:17 +0000

I want to move to SugarSync or similar if I can get organised.

Some time over the months I was trialling SugarSync (across two Macs and a PC), it silently deleted a bunch of files deep in my folder structure. Luckily I noticed, and had a sufficiently old physical backup of those files. But it was a useful reminder that sync is not backup.

Since then I’ve been using DropBox, which looks less snazzy at first but hasn’t actually destroyed any of my data. (Yet.)