Backup, Backup, Backup

I never backed up until I got a Maxtor OneTouch USB HDD. The software that comes with it for Windows is great – just set what folders you want backed up and set a schedule, and let it get on with it. Obviously again doesn’t defend against accidental file deletion (though since you know when your next backup is scheduled for then you should be able to grab it off the OneTouch before it gets deleted).

I’ve been using Unison for a couple of years now, following Kieran’s recommendation. On the downside, it took some time to work out at first (and I spent ages puzzling over on-line guides), but it has worked pretty well since. It has also, lately, been coughing and complaining about files generated by Microsoft Office (well who wouldn’t) and refusing to copy them because of “conflicting permissions”. I’m sure there’s a fix for this but I haven’t put in the time to working it out yet.

For the Mac, it SuperDuper overall, there are/can be many ‘it depends’ involved. One thing to always be concerned with of course is data corruption and proprietary software/compression restrictions.

Henry, I bet you could sue for pain and suffering for having the MBPro taken away.

I’m using Mozy (a daily online backup system) for my Mac; not sure how well it works because so far I haven’t had the need to recover anything. But it saysit works….

Yep — same here (only for Windows). Mozy is much better, though for small important files (documents) than big ones (photos & video) due to the slow upstream bandwidth most of us have. For large files (including my outlook mailbox files), external hard drives and recordable DVDs are better. I’d also suggest that Michael Froomkin had problems partly because of his sophistication — simple is better (for me, anyway).

Big fan of Dropbox

These days I use a combination of syncing and backing up: laptop synced with desktop in office, which is backed up locally via Time Machine. I was using Mozy but it was having problems running on my desktop, so I’m looking for an alternative.

Since I’ve started using version control for stuff, I need to use unison less often — a dvcs makes it easy to have multiple, current clones of a project in different locations, each one of which is also a complete, annotated backup of every step of the development of the project.

What a lot of people miss, in my experience, is that you really don’t want only one type of backup. For typical use, you want to periodically mirror you drive entirely, but you also want incremental backups of your more important data. Depending how badly a rebuild from scratch will set you back, you may want at least two copies of incrementals, one stored remotely. Drives are cheap enough now many people opt to just replace these occasionally, leaving the old ones as stored backups. For your most important/annoying to replace data, your incremental backups and/or a mirror of just that should be stored a few places.

I have a script that mirrors my home machines personal data to a work machine and vice versa, every night. I also have incremental backups of personal data (mirrors alone aren’t any good if you don’t catch a problem before the next nights update!). On top of that, I have a bootable duplicate of my desktops hard drive, mirrored once every few days.

Since all of this is scripts, I don’t have to do anything or remember anything. There are a lot of programs for any program that will do one or both aspects of this, but I suspect that automating it is one of the most important aspects. The backup you forgot to do is useless.

Michael Froomkin had problems partly because of his sophistication—simple is better

This is correct. I really don’t want to add insult to injury, so please consider the following as a constructive attempt to prevent further disasters.

It can happen to anyone at any time (a certain percentage of hard drives just fail), so backups are a good idea, but the most important thing is to prevent these things from happening in the first place and take the right steps, if they occur. The vast majority of problems is caused by users who overestimate their knowledge and fiddle around with stuff they don’t really understand sufficiently. I used to be one of those users once, so I know what I’m talking about and this not meant to sound condescending.

The last time I had to rely on a backup was about ten years ago, maybe because I was lucky, but more likely because I generally know what I’m doing. And tellingly the people whom I sometimes help with their computers (relatives and friends, you wouldn’t believe how popular you become, lol) and who know next to nothing about computers never had to rely on a backup either, probably because they just use Word, Outlook and the like and leave everything else alone.

So the upshot of this is: don’t fiddle around with stuff, you don’t really know about and if you start noticing something unusual (“things running a bit slow” in Froomkin’s case) back up your system and then try to analyse what the cause of that behaviour might be. As soon as you’re out of your depth, look for solutions by asking around on the net, but only apply this advice if the suggested tools or workflows seem familiar and safe. If you’re feeling unsure, it’s much better to invite some knowledgeable acquaintance of yours for lunch on the weekend and have him/her take a look at it. And then there are actually professionals who make a living out of this and can probably save you a lot of time, headaches and money.

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.)

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.