I’m a bit obsessive about protecting my data so this may be a bit overboard, but here’s what I do for backups.
Backing up My iMac - My Main Machine
This is my main machine and all my important data lives here. The entire hard drive is cloned to an external hard drive every night and made bootable. If the internal drive fails I can simply boot up off the external drive by holding down the option key and selecting the external drive as the boot drive. I could even connect the hard drive to another Mac and boot off it.
I use SuperDuper! by Shirt Pocket to create the disk clone. It’s scheduled to run at 1:30am every morning and do a “smart update”. The smart update adds, deletes and modifies the image rather than doing a complete copy. It does back up the virtual machines. I use a Western Digital MyBook drive with a FireWire-800 connection. This takes care of the local backup. When the hard drive in my iMac fails I can boot off the MyBook and be running right away, only missing files that changed since 1:30am.
For off-site backup I use Mozy online backup. I have it set to start a backup whenever my iMac is idle for 15 minutes. It won’t do more than one automatic backup in a two hour period, so it’s not doing a backup every 15 minutes. The backup is encrypted over the wire and on their servers using my own encryption key. I back up all data and program settings, except for my iTunes library, up to Mozy. At over 150GB it’s not feasible to back up the iTunes library over the Internet. Mozy keeps files for 30 days after they’re deleted so I can go back and get them if they’re overwritten or accidentally deleted. Of course, if I don’t notice a problem within 30 days I’m screwed. If I want to do a backup while I’m working I can hit the Mozy icon in the menu bar and kick off a backup immediately rather than waiting for the computer to be idle.
I set Mozy to throttle the upload bandwidth to 2/3 of my rated upload speed. I’ve found that my broadband connection doesn’t seem to like it when either the upload or download pipe is max’d out for extended periods of time. This isn’t unique to Mozy.
I make a second backup of my iTunes library to a share on my Windows Home Server. ChronoSync runs every morning at 5am and syncs any changes from my iTunes library to the Windows Home Server. And by the way, they really need to change the “iTunes” name. While I keep music there, I also have podcasts, audio books and videos from the iTunes store and video I’ve imported from other sources. I still have a gap in the backup of my iTunes library. They’re all in the same room and can disappear together due to fire or theft. I really should be backing up to an external drive that I move offsite every now and then.
Backing up my MacBook
I use my MacBook pretty heavily but there’s not a large amount of data on it at any one time. Most data eventually makes it’s way to my desktop.
I usually save data to my .Mac iDisk (which I sync locally) on my MacBook. This way it automatically syncs up to .Mac and then to my iMac. The data isn’t stuff I worry about, no accounts or financial info, so I don’t worry about encryption.
I have a free 2G Mozy account (that’s a referral link which will give you an extra 256MB of space on the free account) that I use to backup laptop data and settings. This works out well when I’m traveling and can’t copy files to my iMac. Mozy is better able to handle slow/poor connections than .Mac and iDisk. I’m more concerned about having the settings for when I have the inevitable hard drive failure but I do backup the occasional data file. Like Mozy on my iMac, data is encrypted locally with my own key before it gets sent to the Mozy server. I leave Mozy set to backup after 0 minutes of idle time. This means it backs up every two hours due to the limit of one automatic backup within a two hour period. Since backups are quick they don’t impact performance.
Because my laptop tends to be in use when it’s on and turned off as soon as I’m done I have to trigger Mozy or an iDisk sync myself just prior to shutdown if I want to be sure to get a backup. If I’ve updated large files I occasionally have to leave the laptop on for awhile as the backup or sync runs.
Website Backup
I backup my web server by scheduling a sync using Transmit. Visit the previous link to see how I set this up. This is scheduled to run overnight which pulls down all changes to my PCs (and deletes files that are removed from the website). Since the files are now on my computer they are then backed up by Mozy the next time it backs up my computer. This is usually within two hours unless I’m actually using the computer. Since Mozy provides 30 days of version history for files I now have older versions of each file that I can go back to if a file is accidentally deleted or modified and I didn’t notice before the next Transmit sync overwrites my local backup. When I’m making website changes I can create a backup by doing a manual Transmit sync and then manually doing a Mozy backup to make sure I have a record of the last version for at least 30 days.
This backs up all the files but none of the MySQL databases. I used the WP-backup plug-in for awhile but this began to cause high-CPU usage on my web host and lock out my site for a short period. So I’ve switched to the built-in Export command, which I manually do every Sunday and I use the MySQL backup tool provided by my web host.
Other Backups
I have a couple older external drives I can hook up and grab a quick backup if I need to. But none of my other computers have data worth backing. Rebuilding from scratch after any failure is probably just as easy as doing a restore.
Apple OS X Time Machine
I used Time Machine for awhile and liked it. What it lacked for me was the instant recovery of a disk clone. I also had some space issues which seemed to crop up with my iTunes library after I did a restore of it. This caused older backups to be purged sooner than I liked so my backups rarely went back more than two weeks, despite getting off to a great start. But as far as ease of use it was great, despite a few quirks.
If I can scrounge up a 500GB drive I’ll probably give Time Machine another try, but for now I’d rather have the full disk clone over Time Machine.
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