Back up early and back up often!
For many years, I’ve been very good about backing up my computer. I learned that lesson back when I worked in a real office for a real company. Our graphic artist had been working on a very important Photoshop file for over a year. She wasn’t working on that file every day, but whenever she had some time in between other routine projects. The day was almost at hand when she would need to send that file to the printer, so she was stepping up the amount of time she was spending working on this file. The project this file was for was extremely important, and there was no wriggle room in the schedule or the production deadline. At the time, the best backup system available to us was a tape backup system, and she rotated her backups through 5 different tapes, one for each business day of the week. She religiously ran her backup every day to the appropriate tape.
One day, she went to work on the file and it wouldn’t open. Photoshop reported it was corrupted. She tried everything. She called our tech support. Nothing would open that file. Well, okay, she’s got five backups. Pop in the most recent backup tape. The file was corrupted. No problem, there are 4 more backups. She’ll lose a day or two of work, but it’s not a big deal. Pop in the second most recent backup. The file was corrupted. Still not a big deal, one of the remaining 3 backups will surely be good. The third most recent backup — the file was corrupted. Now she’s pretty concerned.
The fourth most recent backup — the file was corrupted. She’s on the verge of panic, and is about to slit her wrists or jump out the nearest window.
The fifth — and last — backup. The file was good! Phew! Okay, she lost 5 days worth of work, but a major disaster was averted.
It turned out that the spools on the tape drive were defective and were stretching the tape as it recorded her data. We were very lucky that the one tape contained her file intact.
The Take-Home Lesson
The take-home lesson from that little adventure is, never rely on one single backup method.
I have an almost-perfect backup system.
- I have several extra hard drives attached to my Mac. I use a great donation-ware utility called Carbon Copy Cloner to run scheduled clones daily, weekly, and bi-weekly. Two clones are “exact mirror” duplicates of my hard drive as it exists at the time of the backup, and two are “incremental” clones that copy over everything new and changed from my main hard drive, but leaves on the clone anything that no longer exists on my main hard drive. The mirrored clones are cloned every day on alternating days. In case of catastrophic failure of my main drive, I could boot from one of the mirrored clones and it would be just as if I had booted from my main drive, with absolutely everything intact and in exactly the same state it was in at the time of the clone. The two incremental clones serve as backups to my mirrored clones, and also allow me to easily retrieve older files that I’ve dumped from my main hard drive, by a simple drag-and-drop.
- Additionally, I use Retrospect to back up my user files to DVD. I rotate between two Retrospect schedules. One runs nightly, in the evening after I’m done working for the day. The other one runs weekly, and backs up my files to a different backup set. The first set maintains a daily archive of all my files, and the second set maintains a weekly archive of all my files.
- I also use Time Machine, Apple’s “Easy Button” backup solution. I didn’t think I would like Time Machine, but I do. I purchased an additional external hard drive to use as my Time Machine disk, and Time Machine runs in the background every hour, backing up whatever files I’ve changed in the past hour. The thing I like best about Time Machine is that it’s so easy to grab any recent version of a file. If I’m working on some particularly complex bit of php code, and I’ve completely bollixed it up, I can use Time Machine to go back to the version I had saved an hour ago, or two hours ago, or earlier. Time Machine wouldn’t be my first choice for a complete restore in case of hard drive failure, but it’s an additional option in case all of my other backups fail simultaneously.
I like Time Machine so much that I bought another hard drive for my husband to use, because he doesn’t back up nearly often enough. Just yesterday he commented to me that he plugs in his Time Machine disk to his laptop every couple of days at the office and lets it do its thing. A backup once every couple of days wouldn’t be nearly enough for me, but it’s a lot better than Tom’s previous backup schedule, which was once every month or two, at best.
I use some other backup approaches, as well. Since I use Parallels virtualization software, with 3 different very large virtual disk images of three different Windows operating systems, and since I use Entourage, with its stupendously stupid monolithic database, I exclude those from my Time Machine and Retrospect backups. I work with a lot of MySQL databases, and those don’t live in my user directory, nor are they easily accessible in the Finder. So I have a couple of cron scripts that generate a complete database dump and a copy of my Entourage database every morning. The computer turns itself on at 5am, and the cron scripts run shortly thereafter. The Windows virtual disk images I just don’t worry about — I don’t keep anything critical on those, so I would just re-install Windows if anything happened to those.
The Weakness in my System
The only weakness in my multilayered backup system is that I have no offsite backups, other than files that I’ve uploaded to the web server. If the house burned down with all my backups, I’d be in a bad way. I’ve been considering signing up for Mozy, or simply using the “poor man’s backup system” by having my husband carry one of my external clones back and forth to his office. The likelihood that his office and our house would both burn down at the same time is extremely low, so that should be pretty safe.
My backup strategy may seem like overkill, but it’s a beefed-up version of my previous backup system, which included a Retrospect backup to DVD and a clone to an extra internal hard drive. At the beginning of this year, both my main hard drive and my cloned hard drive failed at the same time. I ended up replacing the whole computer. Since I had my daily Retrospect backups on DVD, I was able to restore all my files — but it took days to reinstall all my programs, restore all my files, restore my databases, and re-configure all the configurations and settings to where my computer was in a usable state. I had to install php and MySQL, get all the customized Apache configurations back the way I wanted them, enter dozens of application license codes, and generally spend a lot of time messing with things before I was able to do a lick of work for any paying clients.
I was pleased that I didn’t lose any important files (or any files, for that matter), but I was terribly unhappy at the time I had to spend restoring my system. So I instituted additional backups to additional media. Everything runs automatically, so all I have to do is pop in the appropriate DVD regularly. I won’t rest easy until I’m doing regular off-site backups, though.
