January 23, 2010:
Backups, Time Machine, LaCie, and more
Yes, nothing to do with MINIs; move along if you’re looking for GBMINI … unless you don’t have backups of all your computer data!
Ever since I accidentally deleted all my email a few years ago, and even more so since a hard drive failure on a PC I owned, I’ve been slightly paranoid about backups. Unjustified perhaps, since really nothing on my computer is life threatening to lose …
Music (40GB)
I guess it’s theoretically all “backed up” on my iPod (though attempting to move music from one computer to another from the iPod was very unsuccessful – worst, I could re-encode it all from the original CDs – but that would take weeks!
Photos (40GB)
Many of my photos, arguably the “more wanted” ones, exist here on GBMINI, or over on MargaretAndIan, but they aren’t full resolution – I’d prefer not to lose the originals!
Videos (45GB)
Mostly un-edited, so I could pull them back off the original DV tapes (so long as those tapes are not too degraded)
Documents (<<1GB)
Very little data space - but stuff that couldn't be re-created. Although I'm not sure how important the source code for a college project from the mid 80s, written in BCPL, is now ...
Mail (1GB)
I actually, arguably, don't have a backup for this - Gmail has the originals; though Apple Mail has an IMAP copy of everything, I'm not sure how easy it would be to restore to Gmail if the originals vanished! I imagine if the files disappeared from Gmail, then Apple Mail would mirror those deletions ...
I no longer trust hard drives, so while a Time Machine backup is very good, a drive failure in the Time Capsule would be bad – so I use Time Machine with a LaCie 2big Network RAID drive! This arguably gives me three copies of my data, the original on my Mac, and copies on each of the two drives in the LaCie …
The LaCie lives in the basement …
But that’s not enough! What if something happened to my home – I need an offsite backup too …
Up till now, I’ve been using Mozy for my offsite backups; it seems to be pretty reliable on both PCs and Macs, and is “unlimited” (it’s happily holding my 136GB of data right now):
But there’s one big downside to Mozy (and other online backup solutions like Jungle Disk, Syncplicity, …) – recovery time. There’s also the possibility that your online service might fold, but that seems unlikely at least for Mozy.
What if you need to recover files from your online backup? I did a test with Mozy earlier this week, requesting a restore of about 1/2GB of photos. First, you log in to Mozy, go to the restore screen and request the restore. Then you wait for an email – it took an hour to come, for my restore (I suspect it’ll be slower if you want more data restored). The actual download took about 20 minutes (much slower than my Cable Internet could deliver, so limited by Mozy).
So 1-1/2 hours isn’t too bad – but imagine how slow it would be to do a complete restore … Mozy offers a service to mail DVD copies, but it’ll take about a week and cost you, too.
Other options? Apart from Dropbox (recommended – excellent to keep copies on multiple computers as well as online, but expensive), I’ve recently stumbled on to CrashPlan; it’s like Mozy, but with a twist – you can backup to other computers you own, or to friends computers!
Here, you can see that computer PGTiMac1 (my office computer) is backing up to this (my home computer) – it’s not that fast, but that’s because the office only has slow DSL. But it will work, and there’s no annual cost.
What’s better still, on this computer, I can access and restore files from the PGTiMac1 backup – instantly! Then I could dump them to a USB stick and in half an hour they’d be back at work …
You can also agree with a friend to backup your computer to theirs, and theirs to yours – if you password the backup, they won’t be able to restore your files without the password, so you can be backup-safe 
CrashPlan also offers the “traditional” online backup, including a good value $100/year package for “as many computers as you / your family owns” (better pricing than Mozy); but if you own a few computers, or know a few friends with high speed Internet, then check out CrashPlan for a zero cost offsite backup solution – I’m liking it so far
db (2010/01/24 @ 1:35 am)
Hey Ian, great call on CrashPlan. I’ve been installing that on my customers Windows XP PCs for a few months with great results.
When time machine starts to get too annoying or stop working for whatever reason (I’ve found it to be less than reliable for the most part), might I recommend SuperDuper? Besides being a great backup, it can create a bootable backup (if you are using a FireWire external drive) as well as perform incremental backups.
While not as cool as Time Machine with it’s backup-to-the-minute, I’ve been using it since I started using Macs and have been nothing but happy with it.
Also a fan of DropBox. But I mostly use it as an internet-based thumb drive when I need to have access to files on more than one machine.
GBMINI (2010/01/24 @ 7:46 am)
Thanks, DB … what I like (in theory) about Time Machine is that a brand new Apple computer can recreate itself from a Time Machine, presumably to be an exact copy of an older Apple.
I expect Super Duper can’t do that trick?
blalor (2010/01/24 @ 8:48 am)
SuperDuper wouldn’t be able to do that from the installer, but you could boot the new Mac from from its CD and run SuperDuper to restore the backup of the old machine to the new Mac. Not an integrated experience, to be sure, but certainly do-able. You can also do the first-boot process on the new Mac and tell it to transfer over data from that hard drive, but I don’t know the extent of the data it will carry over (like system-wide apps in /Applications or device drivers; maybe, maybe not).
I’m very happy with Time Machine. It hasn’t let me down (yet?). I’ve got several external drives from OWC, but I’ve had horrible luck with them over the last two years and I’m starting to look for alternatives. I’ve had a couple drives mechanisms go bad (not their fault), but the boards in the enclosures themselves seem to have a short half-life, and can be flaky. One external drive works fine, but will go to sleep and not wake up; if I power-cycle the enclosure, it’ll come back, but not without the warning from the OS that I disconnected the drive incorrectly.
db (2010/02/03 @ 9:02 pm)
Sorry, just getting back to this.
SuperDuper will allow you to create a **bootable** backup (again, with a Firewire drive) that you can use to bring your applications and all that back.
As far as a full system restore, I don’t think it will do that. It might, but I haven’t had to yet so I’m not 100% sure what the process is. Sounds like something I need to do however!