Your backup habits?

Desert Fox said:
Copy on my desktop main drive
Copy on my desktop external drive
Copy on my laptop main drive
Copy on my portable drive

I also have a few older portable drives from when I updated that have copies of much of my older stuff on them as well.
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Wanted to add that I find extremely useful for its simplicity is Karen's replicator
 
Most of the files I give a crap about are on Dropbox.

I Time Machine to an external 1TB hard drive occasionally, when I think about it.
 
Brian-M said:
That's one reason I keep copies of the major stuff on my keyring. If the house burns down, or is robbed, or something else happens when I'm out, I'll still have a copy with me.

(I've been thinking that maybe I should keep the external drive hidden in the garage when I'm not using it. The garage isn't connected to the house, so if the house burns down, I'll still have the drive. On the other hand, having to retrieve the drive each time would tend to discourage me from backing up as often.)



That's understandable. I scanned a lot of family photos into the computer when I was a teenager, and I wouldn't want to lose them. I've got them backed up on DVDs and CDs as well. It would take a huge amount of effort to try and find and re-scan the photos. But I might try it next time I travel interstate to visit family.

(I do regret not saving them at a much higher resolution than I did, but back then there was very limited disk space and our computer only had a 640x480 resolution monitor, so none of them were saved at more than 640 pixels wide.)



Why not record them to the computer?

I've occasionally bought an LP from a second-hand store, and recorded it to the computer by connecting the turntable to the line-in socket on my computer. After saving each side as a WAV file (ETA: and after normalizing the recording), I then go through and break it up into individual songs which I save as MP3s.

It takes time, but the end result is equivalent to having ripped the LP to the computer the same way you'd rip a CD.
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We have a 1TB for regular autobackups (daily if the PC is on), and I keep a 2TB drive at my sister's, which I take back every few months (getting less frequent these days).

As for photos and music specifically, Mrs Wobs has scanned many old photos, and aren't really a problem, and we use Adobe for organising them.

I have ripped vinyl using my Brennan, which is very easy, and gives fair results. You even get a choice of bit rates, and volume level.

I then split them up into individual tracks, but haven't done normalisation. Its something I should do, but don't have the software to do them retrospectively en masse.

Long term, I have considered backing up onto a BluRay recorder, as I read somewhere they were a more stable medium than HDs, DVD or CDs.
 
wobs said:
Long term, I have considered backing up onto a BluRay recorder, as I read somewhere they were a more stable medium than HDs, DVD or CDs.
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If you want really long-term storage, you should wait for this to come to market:

Developed at the Kyoto University School of Engineering in Japan, this is a device made up of 100 separate layers of fused silica glass. This has a recording capacity similar to Blu-Ray but can be stored for millions of years.

[...]

The advantage of this type of technical ceramic is that it is highly resistant to heat and water. This makes it a very promising storage medium for long-term historical data, including all manner of personal or public documentation that individuals or institutions or local authorities would like to store for many generations. The data on the product designed by Hitachi and Kyoto University was able to be read even after the ceramic was heated to a temperature of 1,000 degrees Celsius for two hours.

[...]

It has a recording density of 1.5 gigabytes per square inch – similar to Blu-Ray but obviously longer-lasting. Engineers believe that there is a potential to develop new devices with a larger number of layers.
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http://www.multi-lab.co.uk/blog/fused-silica-is-ideal-for-long-term-data-storage

Here's a link to a more detailed article on Hitachi's website: http://www.hitachi.com/businesses/innovation/topics/rd_silica_glass/index.html
 
I have a 1TB fusion drive Mac. Back up to a 1TB network drive with Time Machine.

About once a month I make a (bootable) clone of my boot drive to an external drive. For that I use Carbon Copy Cloner. One could simply clone with the Finder or command line, but shoveling a few hundred gigs around takes a long time. With CCC, once you get a full clone, it can be set to only copy the files that have been changed since the last time.
 
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One thing to consider in terms of archiving files of long term value (photographs for example) is that it is not just the stability of the medium used, but the likelihood of the long term existence of the hardware and software to access it. Whatever the stability of zip disks (remember those?), finding a compatible reader to get data off of s Zip now would not be easy.

I don't have an easy solution. The cloud? At least the technology will be updated by the operators, but what if they want to begin to charge you big time for access? I suspect that one will always have to stay abreast and keep transferring older files to newer storage devices as they become available.
 
Giordano said:
I use Time Machine (on a Mac laptop) and a Time Capsule WiFi link. Every time I enter my office and turn on my laptop it is automatically backed up (first every hour, then every day). If I need to go back, I find a date on the backup, click on it, and the entire desktop, folders, and files are exactly like they were on that date. It is great! I've used it 2 or 3 times to recover old files and it worked like a champ.
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Same here.

I have one old 500g usb drive on my desk. It gave me an error message one day so I bought a 1T usb drive and set it on top of the 500g. Both are hooked to my monitor and each has a TM backup on them. I also have a usb drive at one of my client's offices that I visit about once a week. I hook that up and have TM set to backup there as well.

Finally I have a 1T network drive that I back up to from time to time. Maybe quarterly.
 
Giordano said:
One thing to consider in terms of archiving files of long term value (photographs for example) is that it is not just the stability of the medium used, but the likelihood of the long term existence of the hardware and software to access it. Whatever the stability of zip disks (remember those?), finding a compatible reader to get data off of s Zip now would not be easy.



I don't have an easy solution. The cloud? At least the technology will be updated by the operators, but what if they want to begin to charge you big time for access? I suspect that one will always have to stay abreast and keep transferring older files to newer storage devices as they become available.
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Data is cheap. 5Tb external HD plus all the free cloud storage is adequate.
The people who are paying for oodles of cloud storage keep the providers happy.

No need to be cloning entire drives. Slight overkill.
In Macsville, if disaster strikes, you can go from no OS whatsoever to your previous one in a matter of minutes without lifting a finger or touching a disk. Your Time Machine backup will then do the rest.
All the other big stuff is also on your external HD and in the Cloud.
 
I usually only backup code. I always make sure I have at least three copies in different locations. I usually just email it via gmail to my work email.
At work, I make sure that all of our projects are also on different computers or usb sticks. There was an automatic backup system at first, but when
someone tested that he wasn't able to restore the data. Talk about a false sense of security! If you set up an automatic backup system like this,
make sure you test it.

Trebuchet said:
I like the rear view camera when I back up, but you can't rely on it altogether because the wide angle lens makes pedestrians look farther away than the really are.

Wait, were we talking about computers or something?
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I recently acquired a car with rear view camera and sensors. It makes backing up and parking almost fun. I look behind me the old fashioned way to be sure,
but I've found that I'm using the camera exclusively from that moment onward. There's some distortion, but the big graphic red and green squares make up
for it. And you have sensors. Also, before you back up, make sure all of the pedestrians are targeted by your heat-seeking missiles. I've found that
the best way to deal with the pedestrian-problem.
 
elgarak said:
I have a 1TB fusion drive Mac. Back up to a 1TB network drive with Time Machine.

About once a month I make a (bootable) clone of my boot drive to an external drive. For that I use Carbon Copy Cloner. One could simply clone with the Finder or command line, but shoveling a few hundred gigs around takes a long time. With CCC, once you get a full clone, it can be set to only copy the files that have been changed since the last time.
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Having never relied on my TM backups for anything, I'm a bit unsure as to how they will work. Is there a particular weakness in the TM system that your bootable clone is meant to address?

Thanks.
 
MRC_Hans said:
Crash Plan. Automatic back-up every ... I think I set it to three hours (which is ridiculously often), but ...

There is a fee, but very reasonable.

Hans
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CrashPlan here too. Every day to cloud and external drive.

Mobile phones set to upload pics to both Drive and Dropbox instantly.
 
Brian-M said:
Why not record them to the computer?
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The music is, but it's the physical objects that would be irreplaceable, is what I would miss.

My dad's brown beer can rings and cigarette burns on what would otherwise be a pristine copy of the White Album.
 
These days I would try to keep good backups. I have seen my anti-virus catch several ransom-ware emails in the last few days.
 
Batch file in the startup folder copies files to my personal cloud drive and to a USB-powered 3 TB drive. I have two 3 TB drives; one stays at work and I switch them every month.
 
Pretty much just Dropbox. (It also archives 30 days of deleted files too I think).
When I turn on my media laptop, it immediately gets copies of everything from the work laptop that way. Also I can access them from my smart phone.

I also think that if my work laptop ever got lost or stolen, I could go to my media laptop, copy out all the files from Dropbox, and delete them. If anyone was able to get past my login on the stolen laptop, and connected to the internet, all the files in Dropbox would automatically be deleted there too.

If it's not in Dropbox, I don't really care much about it. Recreating a laptop would be annoying (downloading the programs and such), but not bad. This method seems to match my risk needs fine.
 
Dr. Keith said:
Having never relied on my TM backups for anything, I'm a bit unsure as to how they will work. Is there a particular weakness in the TM system that your bootable clone is meant to address?

Thanks.
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Mostly convenience. I can boot from the clone, and have all my apps readily available. It's also faster to restore the full system from the clone than TM. I rarely need to boot from the clone, though, and can do most of emergency maintenance with Apple's tools very nicely. I started to do the cloning before they had TM, or the recovery partition, though, and just continue the habit.

Every once in a while, TM cannot access its backup drive (since it's a network drive), so I have to manually connect to it. Otherwise, it runs very stable and saved my neck a few times. It's very convenient to be able to go back and restore a specific state of a file, or a folder.

When I bought my Mac, it had a 500 GB physical drive. That drive broke (nothing unusual about that, given its age), and I replaced it with the 1TB Fusion drive (I recommend getting a SSD or Fusion Drive to anyone. It's much faster). I restored from the clone, and some recent work files from TM. Took just a couple of hours. However, after that TM would/could not handle the old backups -- it would refuse to delete the oldest backups (probably saw them as backups from a different Mac), and ran out of space to do new ones. I had to wipe the TM drive and start a whole new backup.
 
elgarak said:
Mostly convenience. I can boot from the clone, and have all my apps readily available. It's also faster to restore the full system from the clone than TM. I rarely need to boot from the clone, though, and can do most of emergency maintenance with Apple's tools very nicely. I started to do the cloning before they had TM, or the recovery partition, though, and just continue the habit.

Every once in a while, TM cannot access its backup drive (since it's a network drive), so I have to manually connect to it. Otherwise, it runs very stable and saved my neck a few times. It's very convenient to be able to go back and restore a specific state of a file, or a folder.

When I bought my Mac, it had a 500 GB physical drive. That drive broke (nothing unusual about that, given its age), and I replaced it with the 1TB Fusion drive (I recommend getting a SSD or Fusion Drive to anyone. It's much faster). I restored from the clone, and some recent work files from TM. Took just a couple of hours. However, after that TM would/could not handle the old backups -- it would refuse to delete the oldest backups (probably saw them as backups from a different Mac), and ran out of space to do new ones. I had to wipe the TM drive and start a whole new backup.
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Thanks for the full response.
 
What I like most about Time Machine, which I believe is also true of at least some of the Windows apps, is that it preserves the directory structure in a very intuitive manner. Click on a date and all the files and folders look exactly and are organized as they were on that date. You can restore the entire computer to that date, or just the files of interest. It has saved me a lot of grief more than once.

I have a friend who used a different backup system several years ago. When his hard drive crashed (and they all will at some point) he was very pleased to remember that he had everything backed up. Until he realized that his backup app did not preserve the folder information and all his files were still correctly named and saved, but lumped together alphabetically into one massive (10,000s of files) directory. Can you imagine trying to find a particular file based only a a half-forgotten, 8 character (at that time) file name? I suspect that most of the backup software out there now doesn't have this problem?
 
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