I recently suffered from a hard drive crash at the worst possible time, just when I was entering the block of time that I set aside to get bunch of things done, that I had been putting off. If it were not for this article, I would have been… in a bad way. I was a slacker and didn’t backup for 2 weeks before the crash (are you starting to see a pattern here) so I lost 2 weeks of data, but I have since learned my lesson. Two notes: This is Mac-centric, I am sure there are PC solutions, I just don’t use one so I don’t know what they are. I am sure they are very similar. I use Carbon Copy Cloner, which makes the process a little easier.
I feel obligated to help anyone with this process since without Someone (namely jwz and Merlin Mann) taking the time and effort to post this info, I would be doing other things like finding a sharp knife rather than taking time out to refresh my brain and body, then spending time figuring out how to serve my customers better. If you have any questions, please contact me. More importantly, if you have a better solution, please post it.
Dear Lazyweb, and also a certain you-know-who-you-are who should certainly know better by now,
I am here to tell you about backups. It’s very simple.
Option 1: Learn not to care about your data. Don’t save any old email, use a film camera, and only listen to physical CDs and not MP3s. If you have no posessions, you have nothing to lose.
Option 2 goes like this: You have a computer. It came with a hard drive in it. Go buy two more drives of the same size or larger. If the drive in your computer is SATA2, get SATA2. If it’s a 2.5″ laptop drive, get two of those. Brand doesn’t matter, but physical measurements and connectors should match. “
Drive crashes can be painful, I’m glad you had a backup available! My brother recently had a head crash with no backup, and he’s currently looking at $475 to get his data back (which, actually, is on the cheap side for data recovery). For periodic backups, I recommend:
* Linux: rsync as mentioned in the LiveJournal entry in the main post.
* Mac: Carbon Copy Cloner as Saul suggested (which is really just an rsync front-end).
* Windows: DriveImage XML, although I don’t think it can do incremental backups, so each time you backup it will copy the whole drive again.
If you’re looking for day-to-day scheduled backups of your most vital files (not system-level stuff):
* Linux: rsync in the crontab (haven’t tried to find a more user-friendly solution as I’m not on Linux all that much).
* Mac: Time Machine has worked well for me, some people have reported issues with it, YMMV.
* Windows: SyncBack (Free/Pro/SE) is a super powerful backup and synchronization utility.
I hope this helps anyone out there looking to secure their data!
YMMV – Your Mileage May Vary
I don’t do incremental back-ups. I just re-copy everything every time. I (should) do it at night so I don’t have time constraints. It is a little scary when I have erae the disk and then clone… Yikes!
The Crossfit Games Nor Cal Qualifiers Are Coming time to train HARD!!! http://norcalcfqualifier.blogspot.com/
Jan 3, 2009 WOD
100m Run
11 KB Swings Right Hand (16kg)
11 KB Swings Left Hand (16kg)
21 Box Jumps (30″)
100m Run
8 KB Swings Right Hand (16kg)
8 KB Swings Left Hand (16kg)
15 Box Jumps (30″)
100m Run
5 KB Swings Right Hand (16kg)
5 KB Swings Left Hand (16kg)
9 Box Jumps (30″)
Time (10:10)
I’ve not had a drive crash yet, but I’ve got a pretty redundant setup to prevent anything from happening.
I backup my mac laptop drive to an external drive setup with TimeMachine which I plug in almost every day. I’ve also setup a network TimeMachine drive for it too. The network drive points to my Linux server on my home network where I’ve got 1.5 TB in a RAID 5 array. So that backup is redundant and happens anytime I bring my mac onto my home network. And then third, I use BackBlaze for an online backup. BackBlaze just runs anytime there is a net connection and works on Windows as well for $5 a month.
With any good backup strategy, most people recommend having backups in several locations. I recommend having a local hard drive and some sort of remote backup as well in case of theft, fire, disaster, etc.