A Frustrating Journey
Recent events had me thinking about what would happen if my RAID controller died or the OS became corrupt? I’ve yet to test a server restore. It’s a long weekend and now’s as good as anytime to test. If I need to reinstall and manually recreate users and shares I have the time. Recreating share and users would never be fun, but at least it would be a time of my choosing. So what did I learn? Read the rest »
It's been a year since I looked at my backup strategy. Having just rebuilt my PC twice in the last few weeks it was a good time to go through the review. It's a bit of a hodgepodge but it's automatic and works. Here's the tools I use and a high-level view of how I do the backups. Read the rest »
This story has been kicking around a couple of days – T-Mobile Sidekick users appear to have lost all their personal data. Sidekick is a Microsoft product (through Danger, which they bought) and the data is on their servers, not T-Mobile’s. Now the rumor of choice is that it was a failed SAN upgrade and Microsoft didn’t have a backup strategy so there weren’t any backups. It’s hard to imagine this happening at a company like Microsoft. We don’t expect them to be run like a fly-by-night operation. Yet they [...] Read the rest »
The days of using a few floppy disks to backup important files are long gone. In going through my website I realized that the information about my backup strategy was a bit dated and didn’t reflect how I do things. Going through everything in order to write this article would also help me be sure I had a bulletproof backup strategy. The goal is to have a solid backup solution so I never have to use a file recovery tool like Data Rescue II. So here goes… My Backup Philosophy [...] Read the rest »
I’ve always been paranoid about backups, a file doesn’t exist unless it was in two places. And then there’s off-site backups which add a third place for important or expensive (time & money) files. Things like RAID and file duplication (in WHS) don’t count as two places. If a RAID or disk controller failed the files could be lost. RAID and file duplication are good against drive failures and allow you to keep working, but they aren’t a replacement for backups. This week I got a object lesson that proved [...] Read the rest »
SyncToy is a free utility from Microsoft that runs on Windows XP and Windows Vista. The latest version is version 1.4 which was released in October 2006. At it’s basic level SyncToy allows the synchronization of two directories. In this article I’ll show how I’ve used it to schedule backups to an external drive. The specifics can be changed to meet your specific needs. I started looking into alternative backup solutions when the windows software that came with the Maxtor external drive proved buggy. Requirements My requirements are simple: Must [...] Read the rest »
I’d been manually backing up my website whenever I did changes and I use the synchronize feature in Transmit to do it. Transmit is a FTP client for the Mac by Panic Software. Transmit remembers settings between sessions so it was easy enough to do this if the only synchronize I ever did was the web backup. Or if I trusted myself to reset things correctly before each session. Since the whole point of synchronize is to only copy/delete the changes it’s important to keep things the same. Plus it’s [...] Read the rest »
Updated Oct.23, 2007: Information on my latest backup strategy and tools now has it’s own page. I wrote about various backup strategies I’ve had in the past but it’s time to update that and to do it in a smaller, concise article. iMac Backup My iMac, with a 500GB hard drive, is the only computer I have that contains data that I need to back up. Full Disk Clone The iMac wakes from sleep at 3AM every morning and SuperDuper! runs a scheduled clone of the hard drive to a [...] Read the rest »
Today brought another story of a company having to redo most of a month’s work due to failed backups. Business 2.0, a magazine that frequently reminds readers that they need to back up their data and compared it to… …flossing – everyone know’s it’s important, but few devote enough thought or energy to it. Their editorial system crashed and then lost all the work they’d done for their June issue. The only thing that saved them was the fear of litigation. They had copy-edited the text and sent it off [...] Read the rest »
In part one I covered my “formative years” where backups were little more than creating multiple copies of the files the best way I could. Since I always got my files back when I needed them I could claim it worked, but there was luck involved too. My move to using a Mac as my primary desktop a couple years ago was a good opportunity to examine my backup strategy. Backups for the Mac ended up being easier than I expected. At the basic level I could simply buy a [...] Read the rest »