MacExcellence

Are you Backing Up?

Tue, June 19, 2007

Well. Are you?

Drive space is getting less and less expensive, and drive capacities are getting larger and larger.

I recently purchased a 500GB SATA external drive for $139, and I am using it for my nightly backups. I will likely purchase a second at some point and work out an even more secure strategy for my files.

Backup solutions are developing nicely on the Mac platform, even in the death throes of the formerly great Retrospect. (Retrospect is dead, long live Retrospect.)

Current Recommendations

My current favorite solution is a combination of large hard drive and an application called SuperDuper. Stupid name—great product. It works beautifully, executes flawlessly, schedules effortlessly—well, you get the idea.

It creates bootable backups, and even pulls off some Unix tricks in the process, like leveraging symlinks (Symbolic Links 00 fancy Unix aliases) to allow the creation of “Sandboxes,’ or parallel installations that utilize your existing apps and home folder while allowing you to experiment with updates/upgrades on a “Sandbox” system install. The gist is that you can try things out on your Sandbox installation, and if everything is OK, you can clone the changes to your regular install. If the changes are not good, however, you simply boot back into your “real” system. Very cool. I probably made it sound more complicated than it is.

Other worthy tools include Carbon Copy Cloner, my former favorite. The reason I gave SuperDuper the edge was its flexible array of options. Check it out for yourself.

Buy a Clue?

If you are not backing up, and if you have no strategy, and if you have no clue where to buy one (that’s a joke) then you should give us a call—soon. With drive sizes increasing seemingly faster than Moore’s Law (well—if it were drives he was talking about—but you get the idea), and with these drives coming in smaller and smaller form factors, the propensity for failure or data corruption becomes exponentially greater. You need to be backing up.

Your Digital Life

It’s all on there. Your pictures, music, movies. Your Mac has become the digital hub that Apple envisioned, but not without its downside.

Your pictures, music and movies could be wiped out in a millisecond. The cost of retrieval from a severely damaged drive is prohibitive. The cost of backing it all up in the first place is a couple hundred bucks. Hmmm…

If you’re a Corporate client, then the need for effective backup is a no-brainer. It’s your business assets, hours upon man-hours of work. No room to wiggle; no chances to take.

See No Evil

If you are not sure about your backup, if you know deep in your gut that it’s probably not current, working, running when it’s scheduled to run, etc., don’t stick your head in the sand and pretend to yourself that it’s OK. That you can wait a while longer.

Call us to take a look at your current strategy, or to consult with you to create one. We’ll do what’s in your best interests. No agendas. We just want to keep you running as best we can. And, as always, we think that’s your goal as well.

You know the number.