Geek Blog - My Backup Plan
Geek Blog - My Backup Plan
My Backup Plan
Mac Equipment
I have two pieces of Mac Hardware, my main machine is a 24" iMac and my other is a macbook pro. Below is the backup strategy I use. Some are machine specific and they are listed below.
First off all my documents, notes etc are all stored "online" so to speak, I don't save any of my documents on the local hard drives, this is for a couple of reasons, one is that I can always work on them, where ever I am, also I can access them on any environment, Windows, Mac OS, Linux etc. They are automatically backed up for you.
For general notes and most of my documentation (pdf format) are stored within Evernote, I love using Evernote as it is so simple, I can write draft posts or general notes, click one button and then from there it is synced and I can move on, plus where ever I go I can access them via a PC or via the iPhone application.
I also use two other services, iDisk from having a Mobile Me account, and Dropbox (If you use this link and sign up you will get an extra free 250Mb). I have the documents duplicated on the two different methods. This is incase one of the services are down I can continue to access my documents. This is not too much of a manual task as I can just work on the document then also save it/upload to the other location. I personally prefer to use dropbox the majority of the time, sometimes the upload time even for a word document tends to take a long time to iDisk or to sync from the mac seems to take a while.
For privacy reasons if the documents etc are of a sensitive nature I store them within a truecrypt container, this way I know they are protected if anyone ever did get access to my machines.
Physical Backups
I use Super Duper to make clone backups of my macs, as I have paid for the license for Super Duper which for around £20 it is well worth it, with the free version you can make clone backups until your heart is content, but with the paid version, it allows me to schedule my clones, which are updated via the Smart Update feature, basically it is like carrying out incremental backups. This saves lots of time, and I can schedule for the backups to run at a convenient time. For my main iMac I schedule this to run weekly on a Sunday evening when I know I won’t be on the machine.
With my macbook pro as this is used less often I have a reminder in OmniFocus to carry this out once a month, however if I do lots of work on the laptop I will manually run super duper smart update as soon as I get a chance.
On the iMac I have Time machine running all the time, to catch the backups for everyday work and changes to the system. I did have this backing up to my Time Capsule, as you can read here, I have had several issues with this, and at the time of writing this I may change the drive I use.
UPDATE ** I have now changed my drive, I now have a 1Tb iomega drive connected to my main machine via firewire. The backups are a lot quicker now, and by not stressing my time capsule to much hopefully it will last a lot longer. **
With regards to the macbook I have moved my time machine backup to run off of a portable hard drive. I have recently purchased and now use a Gdrive mini (you can read my review of this device here ) and I carry this around whenever and where ever I go with my Macbook. This is because where ever I am I will always be able to back up my laptop and have a backup, also the option to restore if I accidently delete a file (it has been known)
I also have two automater scripts, one to copy my iPhoto library to an external disk and also to move my domain iWeb files, scheduled to run once a week. My sites (personal and some customer) have been created on iWeb it is very important I do not lose this information.
I also have manual backups in place, I copy directories i.e. iTunes library, iPhoto library to external disk when ever there are changes, i.e photo inserts or iTunes movie/album purchases. To me I suppose the most important file is my iPhoto library i can't imagine if i lost all the photos of my kids etc, somethings can't be replaced. ( I can now imagine a lot of readers thinking I must get a copy of my photos)
If I do make changes in the week to my domain files for iWeb i.e. any changes to my site or a new post like this one, then I will manually take a copy of the domain file, to a backup source. I have also updated this now to also backup my Bento database file.
More and more I am putting information in Bento so I can have very useful databases. I have one simple automater script now which will take a copy of the Bento Database file, iWeb Domain Files and my Keychains both system and 1Passwd. I run this manually each time I close one of the applications.
Windows Equipment
Again like my Macs I use Evernote and Dropbox to store all of my documents etc. As both pieces of software are cross platform, I always can work on any of my documents where ever I am.
With regards to my Windows machines, I now use Arcsoft TotalMedia Backup as my backup software of choice. The main reason I use this software is that it came with a drive that I am currently reviewing.
The software is very easy to use, it has a simple interface, and you can do incremental backups. I backup straight to the external disk, my weapon of choice at the moment is a Hitachi 500Gb carbon fibre external drive USB 2.0. You can easily select whole drives or just individual folders to backup. It labels the folders by date so you can easily see when you carried out the last backup. It also keeps a log-file, very handy when completing an incremental backup so you can see in details what files have changed.
I just backup this netbook every couple of weeks, sometimes once a month, that does not seem very frequent but its only because I really only use this for surfing the net etc. I also use this to write initial posts etc and for that I use documents saved within dropbox or type them up using evernote. As this is synced often, I hardly ever store information on the local hard drive.
As always I am always interested in feedback so feel free to add any comments here
Wednesday, 24 February 2010