What's your computer backup strategy/solution

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I’m in the process of installing Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard” on my old Mirror Door G4 tower, and I think I have a reasonably good redundant backup system…

the MDD has four internal hard drives, a 120GB drive, 2 160 GB drives, and a 250GB, the 120 is my misc. drive, currently it’s housing a direct clone from my primary drive

I’ve just merged the two 160’s into a Mirrored RAID, the RAID will be my primary drive, and since it’s a mirrored RAID, the same data is written to both drives, if one drive in the RAID goes down, i can run off the other one until I get another 160 to rebuild the RAID (which is set for automatic rebuild in case of failure)

I’ve just installed 10.5, and it’s currently migrating my user account over from the 120 to the RAID drives

I also just purchased a 250, and that’ll be used as my Time Machine drive (yes, you can use an internal drive as a TM drive), and of course, the Time Machine drive is named TARDIS :wink:

so, once the process is done, I’ll have a 160GB dual-drive Mirrored RAID (a redundant backup system in and of itself) being backed up** to a 250GB Time Machine drive, and I’ll have a spare 120GB for miscellaneous crap, I think I’m pretty safe here

And once a month or so, I’ll back up my critical files (music and photos mainly) to DVD-R for a permanent archive

not bad for a machine that sees only recreational use (gaming, light Photoshop dabbling and websurfing) and has no mission-critical data on it, and thanks to Murphy’s Law of Data Stability***, the system should never suffer a catastrophic hardware failure resulting in the loss of data, gotta love triple-redundant backups

…Hmm, wonder if Time Machine can back up to a mirrored RAID, next week I should pick up another 250GB and set it up as a RAID with the current 250

**Time Machine backs up data hourly, weekly, and monthly all automatically and is only limited by the size of the backup media

***Murphy’s Law of Data Stability;
The chances of suffering a catastrophic hardware failure resulting in the loss of data is directly inversely proportional to the value of the data on the drive, the number of backups you have, and the last time you backed it up, the amount of data lost depends on the value of the data and the last time it was backed up…

so, your only business machine, with a single, un-backed-up hard drive will fail catastrophically at the least convenient moment, taking all your data with it, with no hope of recovery

conversely, a machine that’s only used for fun, but that has multiple redundant hard drives and is regularly backed up, will never fail

What’s your backup strategy?

2

I copy all my important files to three places:

  1. an internal hard drive
  2. an external hard drive
  3. a RAID-5 terraserver

Admittedly, I should also have an off-site backup on easily transportable media like DVD or Blu-Ray.

3

My strategy? Wishfull thinking…

4

If something can destroy your data on one internal drive, it can destroy it on every drive in that machine. At the minimum, an external drive that is only connected for the purpose of backing up is sufficient, unless you need the real deal. Off site is the real deal. Of course, not all that much really needs the real deal. Anything you buy on a disk can be bought on another disk, and doesn’t merit more than convenience backup.

If you got sensitive financial data, contracts, original art, etc, you should automatically archive to duplicate media, and get one of them to another city, preferably on a different tectonic plate. A different political jurisdiction might be important, too, if you have worries about your own. (Make a private arrangement with a friend, and keep each other’s archives for free.)

If you do really involved, very time sensitive, and highly valued computer work, then you need encrypted real time off site mirroring, which is expensive, and you really don’t need it if you aren’t running the equivalent of a NASA launch system, or Private Stock Exchange.

A little bit secure is kinda fun. But it isn’t secure, so only pay for as much fun as you want.

Tris

5

I have different levels of backup, depending on the importance of the files in question.

My main backup is an external hard drive that gets disconnected from my computer and stored elsewhere, although still in the house. It’s still large enough to hold all my office-type files, as well as all my digital pictures (although soon i’ll need something bigger). I haven’t gotten into digital video at all, so i’m not faced with the challenge of backing up really huge video files.

For stuff like the digital photos, i also back them all up onto DVDs, usually twice over just to be safe. Same with a fair bit of my other personal material.

There is some stuff that i absolutely can’t lose, like my notes and writings related to my dissertation. Luckily, most of that information is contained in relatively small files like Word documents, which can easily be compressed into a RAR file and stored online. It’s really amazing how little space text-type documents use. I have compressed (and strong-password protected) files of my most essential material in a few different places: on my computer; on my external HDD, on DVDs, and at a couple of online locations.

I have lots of other stuff related to my work that i would prefer not to lose, but could relatively easily replace. For example, i have a LOT of articles and dissertations, downloaded in pdf from a variety of academic databases. I don’t back all of them up rigorously, but i do keep a record of what they are, and which database they came from, so that i could replace them quickly and easily if they got lost or erased.

Actually, the ever-increasing number of online resources, combined with broadband internet that makes downloading such things relatively quick and repeatable, means that i will often open an article, take what i need from it, and then close it again without ever storing it permanently on my hard drive.

6

The PCs have RAIDed drives (one has RAID 1, the other RAID 5), and I back up to an external USB drive.

7

I burn a dvd about once a year. It then goes in the cupboard I have full of ancient cds and dvds never to be seen again. I keep thinking about getting some kind of network attached storage or usb hdd enclosure strictly for backup. I know I’d just end up using them as movie storage space though.

8

Backup documents onto seperate hard drive every month, image computer onto external hard drive every three months, keep spare PC around.

9

I have a RAID 1 array for stuff I care about, but not enough to take more effort to protect. Mostly media files.

I used to back up my laptop’s drive nightly, by making a bootable copy of it on a Firewire disk. I would swap the disk every week for another one that I leave at work.

However, I just installed Mac OS 10.5, and Time Machine seems quite well-executed, so I think I will switch to doing regular Time Machine backups on two different disks.

10

For years I used to back up to an external tape drive, which was good in one respect: it was easy to store the tapes off-site. The downside was that it was pretty slow.

Now I use Retrospect to back up to an external HDD. Complete backups about monthly and burn a bootable disaster recovery CD.

Then bi-weekly, or whenever had created or modified some important files, or added a new program, do incremental backups.

Do this for both my desktop and laptop. If I was really more careful, would get another external drive and do it to both, keeping one offsite, but in case of fire or other danger, it will be easy to grab the external drive and my laptop.

Oh, yeah, also use MS SyncToy and every few days sync everything on the desktop to the laptop, so the latter is an exact duplicate of my desktop. That only takes a minute or so.

11

Before upgrading to Mac OS X 10.5, I imaged the 120-gig drive in my MacBook Pro to a disc image on an external 120-gig drive using Carbon Copy Cloner. The MB Pro drive was only 40 gigs full, so the sparse disc image it made on the external drive was around that size.

Longer term, I’m going to get a terabyte external drive and incrementally back up to a partition on that, as well as rescue all the files from my old 300-gig NTFS drive and put them there. Then I can reformat and reuse the NTFS drive.

I’d like to do a network backup to an external drive as well; I’ll have to look into that. I have another 120-gig drive that I was going to use for a Time Machine drive, but *it died while I was cloning to it. *

12

I have an old PC in the kids’ closet running Linux serving up two 128GB drives with Samba. I store all of my MP3s, photos, and documents on those drives.

Each family member has a personal Samba share, so when they log in to a machine, they always have their personal network drive attached.

Once a week (or two weeks) I use SyncToy on a desktop machine to copy everything over from the Samba drives to an external 320GB MyBook. I then disconnect that MyBook and put it … on a bookshelf (where else?)

I have been working this way for years, always accessing a network drive from my MacBook Pro to edit any documents – a bit of a pain since Mac Os X doesn’t really handle shared drives as nicely as Windows does.

My whole Mac experience changed with Time Machine yesterday. I plugged in a spare 320GB USB drive and watched in amazement a Leopard offered to use the drive for TM, and from that point forward it worked completely transparently.

I moved all of my docs back on to the Mac and played around with TM, checking out the various states of my Desktop folder over a few hours.

I feel comfortable enough to keep those docs all on the Mac, but I will soon have to come up with a way to get them occasionally copied to the Linux/MyBook setup.

Robust? Not really. A fire could destroy it all, and that Linux server could die at any time (It’s a 1997 Toshiba). But if a fire did destroy it, and everything else, I will be happy if we escape unhurt.

13
  1. Laptop commutes with me (lawyer – sole practioner), McAfee for nasties;
  2. Printout of all data kept at office; paper copies of each client’s data also with each client, all completed pleadings, affidavits etc. for each client also with each client and also filed with court; the only part of client files that do not have paper backups are my handwritten notes, which usually are not important enought to back-up, but when they are, I scan them;
  3. Mozy out on teh intrawebs every couple of hours (thanks to a doper who put me on to this!);
  4. An External HDD daily, only plugged in for transfers, kept at the office;
  5. A DVD weekly, kept at home.
14

I really don’t have any unreplacable files, but some word documents I couldn’t stand to lose. Once every couple months I e-mail myself all my important documents. So far, Hotmail’s storage limits haven’t been met.

15

Retrospect runs at 2 AM and alternates nights backing up either my boot partition or my secondary partition to partitions of an external FireWire drive.

It creates “duplicates” (clones) and I can boot from the backup (and do so every once in a while).

Now and then I nuke the backups to get rid of all the detritus (files I deleted from the source volumes; backup is set to back up changed files, not to erase and start from scratch each time; so the backups accumulate stuff I decided I didn’t want on the source hard drives).