Backing up is hard to do
Backing up your Mac is one of those jobs we all know we should do, but one that many of us find at the bottom of the to do list, after all backing up doesn’t pay the bills does it?
With so much of our lives and businesses existing in digital form, and living on a hard drive, it is more important than ever to have a comprehensive and effective backup strategy in place. I have lost count of the times I have been faced with a distressed user who has just lost all their work or family photos. Its doesn’t need to be like that. An automated backup system doesn’t have to be complicated or expensive, so there really is no excuse.
The weakest part of the backup chain is always you, the end user. We all live busy lives and thats why the best backup strategies are those that don’t requier much end user interaction.
In this post I seek to give a brief overview of backup solutions for Mac users, whether you’re a home user or have a large network of Mac’s.
One of the cheapest, and most simple backup solutions you can use is the hard drive backup. This relies on an external USB2 or Firewire hard drive and some backup software to handle the automation. My application of choice is Qdea’s Synchronize product, but there are similar products such as Carbon Copy Cloner and Super Duper. Qdea do a Pro and non Pro version, and which version you go for depends mainly on whether you want to do a full, bootable system backup or just your data. The Pro version costs $99 and the non Pro version is $49. Synchronize can trigger a backup based on a number of criteria including my proffered option of when you plug the drive in. Synchronize recognises that you have plugged your external drive in and runs the backup.
If you are backing up a lot of data this can take a while the first time the backup runs, subsequent backups only backup those files that have changed or are new, these backups run very quickly. Once completed, Synchronize can be configured to quit, unmount the drive and display a message that the backup competed. Sychronize has many features and this isn’t intended as a review, but it is very configurable, easy to use, and will provide a simple but very effective backup strategy for most users. With external storage so cheap, you can get a drive and the software for a little over £100, a small price to pay to know that all those family photos or business data is safely backed up.
You can do more than one backup too, with iPod capacities getting so big these day, why not get an iPod that is bigger than your needs and use the extra capacity for a backup. Lets say you get the new 160GB iPod classic and your music etc only takes 100GB, well you can backup at least 60GB of your data. This can be good as syncing your music is something you may do on a regular basis and makes sure that even if you haven’t remembered to plug your hard drive in for a few weeks, chances are you will have plugged your iPod in.
That’s all well and good but, what if you are a business and you really can’t afford the downtime, you need your data accessible all the time. There is a new product on the market called the Drobo storage robot. Despite the silly name, this product gives you the protection of a RAID system without the complexity or expense. Essentially the Drobo allows you to plug in 2 or more SATA hard drives in to its 4 drive bays. Should one of your drives fail, the Drobo intelligently manages your data to ensure none is lost and you don’t even have to stop working, your data remains accessible. Lets say you add 4 500GB drives, this will give you a usable capacity of 1.4TB. Unlike RAID, if you want to add capacity or replace a failed drive, just pop it out and drop another drive in, the Drobo figures the rest out. I must stress that I haven’t actually used this product but if it does what it says then this looks like a great solution for those looking for a scalable fault tolerant storage solution. For a 1.4TB spec’d Drobo, expect to pay around £600 plus VAT.
Of course none of these solutions cover you against theft or fire. Again, you have a number of options from simple and cheap to complicated and expensive. You could just have a second hard drive, once a week you plug both drives in and the second drive backs up the backup, you then put this in a fire safe or leave it with a neighbour, for business users you could take it off site of an evening. The next step up is a tape drive but these are expensive and tend to be complicated. However they do offer a great deal of flexibility and scalability. Tape drives are the established standard for enterprise level backup. Most Mac users that have ever used a tape drive will be familiar with EMC’s Retrospect software. Retrospect is one of those applications that seems to go out of its way to make things complicated and difficult. I have recently come accross a piece of software called Bru that seems to make a much better job of things and does it with a lot less fuss.
So what solution do I use? I run Synchronize Pro and backup my work folder every 4 hours to the server in the office. Every morning it also does a backup of my entire home directory, and once a week it backs up my entire machine. The server backs up the backup drive to a second drive once a week. This means that if a file corrupts, I have a week to discover the corruption before my backup copy also become corrupt. I also backup my home folder to my iPod whenever its plugged in.
Please feel free to contact us if you wish to discuss your backup requirements.