Today's Pointers column is both seasonally and environmentally conscious: it is seasonal in that we assume you will be getting some fabulous new gear before the end of the year, and it is environmental in that 30 percent of it is made up of recycled content. Back in August, we wrote a Pointers column about the value of
off-site backups, and you'll see some of that again here -- but this time we're going to talk about backups generally -- it's wise, it's easier than you think, and you might need one so you are ready to transfer your data over to your new
datathing when the time comes.
If you are one of those very naughty people who haven't done a backup, or haven't done one recently, let's talk about the basics. For a desktop or notebook Mac, you need at least an external drive of some sort. Depending on what you want to save and how much of it there is (go for the lazy approach and save everything, preferably automatically), you could use something as small as a USB "thumb" drive, or as big as a RAID array, but people just hook up a regular spinning hard drive (powered or self-powered) and turn on Time Machine. That's at least a good start. For mobile devices, periodically doing a backup to either iTunes (locally) or iCloud are your two primary options, and should be done either automatically or manually.
Making a local backup
The Time Machine or manual backups are called "local" backups, since they are stored on your own equipment. Since we're on this topic, let me say that my personal recommendation for local backups is to have two: an automatic, incremental backup that runs at least daily -- the aforementioned Time Machine software built into the OS X system will do nicely for that -- and a separate, full "clone" bootable backup of your system for both troubleshooting and quick recovery when your normal boot drive suddenly goes south.
For making a "bootable clone," you need a third-party program -- but you have several options. The leading candidates are
Carbon Copy Cloner,
SuperDuper, and (particularly for more elaborate backups)
ChronoSync. We have recommended each one of those in the past, and continue to do so now. Try 'em out and pick one, but just get on with it.
It's best to keep this bootable clone on a completely separate drive from your Time Machine backup, and I personally think the bootable one should be on a small portable, self-powered USB 3.0 or Thunderbolt drive for greater flexibility and portability. You'll bring it with you when you travel, which is of course when you're away from your automatic backup routine, and thus when you're most likely to have a data disaster happen, right?
Desktop and portable hard drives
So in my case, I have one computer and two local backups: one external hard drive (one of those big desktop 3TB units) for continuously backing up my 1TB boot drive using Time Machine, and then a small portable 1TB USB 3 hard drive that I plug in a couple of times a week for scheduled ChronoSync clone backups. As the term "bootable" implies, the portable can thus be booted from pretty quickly, and reflects a perfect copy of everything exactly as it is currently on my machine. Time Machine backups are great, excellent for restores because they are so up-to-the-minute, but they aren't bootable -- they work well with the Recovery Partition or Internet Recovery if it comes to that, though.
Points of failure
Time Machine's lack of being a true clone (even though it does copy everything, and we mean
everything, from the boot drive) is less of a big deal than it used to be, because now Apple automatically creates a small "recovery" partition on Mac hard drives that you can boot from and do a restore or just recover stuff if the "boot partition" suddenly doesn't work for some reason. Of course, if the entire hard drive has just melted down like a nuclear core, that recovery partition isn't going to do you a bit of good. Cue the need for a bootable clone.
Bootable backups also have other good reasons for being around. You can quickly troubleshoot a sudden problem by booting from the clone, you can get back to work immediately in the case of sudden boot drive failure while you're in the middle of a project, you can make a bootable clone of your existing system before doing a major upgrade so you can, if necessary, roll back to before you did that if things don't work right. In short, bootable clones rock.
So you may think you're well-covered if you have both a Time Machine (or similar) backup and a bootable backup -- but you'd be wrong. The reason is that you're overlooking another possible point of failure: disaster. Something like your house got swept away by a hurricane, or ransacked by burglars, or destroyed in a fire, swallowed by a sinkhole, struck directly by lightning, or your backups were eaten by an alligator (can you tell I used to live in Florida?).
If you have multiple backups, you will probably scratch your head once every couple of years and wonder why you have so many, since you have never needed them (yet). It's the same reason you have life insurance even though you're still alive, and health insurance even if you're perfectly healthy and don't expect any of that to change: it's protection against the unexpected. Your local backups might get swept away, stolen, burned to a crisp or reclaimed by Mother Nature right along with your computer and its original drive. Unlikely, depending on where you live, but it could happen.
This is one of the numerous reasons we like putting our cloned bootable backup on one of those small USB 3 portable drives: they are very easy to grab that when you have to evacuate, can be used to boot up another Mac temporarily, and are small enough that you'll be allowed to keep one at the shelter until the disaster is over. So, how does one further protect one's data from disasters and catastrophes? That's where you want to add another component: off-site backups.
Making an off-site backup
I would daresay most home computer users do not have any sort of off-site backup, because they perceive it to be expensive (and it can be), or time-intensive (generally, no) or too much work (not at all). Doing the first backup to an online service or a drive you're intended to store elsewhere can be a hassle, yes, but after that the changes and updates should be minimal. Still, there's another way to make off-site backups work better and easier for you: don't back up absolutely everything to an off-site backup the way you probably would a local backup.
Not all of the things you put on a computer are intrinsically valuable or worth the effort to protect, but -- and this is more true than most people realize until they're lost --
some of it is. Your financial records in your accounting program, that email you once got from Steve Jobs, and of course all those digital photos that exist nowhere else (at least not at full resolution). This sort of stuff generally constitutes only a fraction of your hard drive: anything from a few MBs to a few GBs for most people, even including photos.
By reducing the off-site backup to just the core and irreplaceable things, that sort of backup will fit on more portable, storable, or permanent forms: a USB thumb drive, a burned DVD or DVD-DL (not a lot of space on these, but should be readable for many years to come), small self-powered hard or SSD external drives, and other things you can put in a safe or safe deposit box for nearly permanent storage. For this sort of stuff, redundancy and diversity of storage is a must.
Businesses have been doing this since computers became a thing. First using tape systems, and now more frequently drives, or cloud services, they protect the most valuable of their data and upload it, or take it away from the location of the business, precisely in case of disaster. Your data is no less valuable to you, so you should do the same.
For iOS devices, the most common backup strategy is simple: iCloud. This backs up a list (rather than the actual files) of the apps and other purchases you've made from the iTunes Store, and most data associated with those apps and other purchases (even free apps or media are considered "purchases"). This is limited to the 5GB free limit of iCloud, unless you pay for more storage (which is pretty cheap: $1 a month gets you 50GB), so it might not back up absolutely everything, but it gets all the core stuff you've added: contacts, calendars, apps, and related data. Your high scores may (or may not) be stored in GameCenter; your photos and music are already "backed up," in a sense, by also existing on your Mac or PC (which is also, presumably, being backed up).
A local backup of an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch (done through iTunes) will go a bit further: chat logs, high scores, game play states, iMessages, and -- if you encrypt the local backup, and you should -- any health data that's been collected on you, such as steps taken and exercise activity, including from the Apple Watch or supported third-party bands that feed that data into their own apps or the secure Health app built into OS X. Very handy to have that stuff when you move to a new device.
For computers, though, you have all kinds of options (yes, including iCloud). That key data you need preserved above all might fit on a thumb drive you can give to a relative, or put in a cloud folder from some other service to which a trusted associate also has access (sorry to get heavy, but nobody lives forever). Data that's unlikely to ever change (edited photos, past tax returns, former medical records, last will and testament) can be burned onto a DVD, which if stored properly will resist decay and accidental magnetic erasure (since burned DVDs use dye color changes to make the bits), whereas that brilliant novel you're backing up on hard drive goes poof as soon as your kid waves his new strong magnet set over it a few times.
There's also the option of having one of those portable hard drives for larger quantities that I mentioned as good for full backups. Using one of those might work well if the drive isn't going very far off-site, say to a friend or relative's home or just shuttled between work and home, where it can periodically be retrieved and checked, or updated with additional data. This works well for data that gets changed periodically, like monthly business records or a personal archive you want to keep adding to going forward, but still has the advantage of being elsewhere if something should happen to you.
A program like
ChronoSync can be used to synchronize such a drive with the corresponding data on the machine being backed up each time the backup drive is connected, or even over the Internet if desired. Just the material you specified is mirrored, as it is changed or when you reconnect the backup drive as you wish. It stands out from straight cloning programs (which are great too) by being highly customizable.
Why be so diligent with backups? In addition to saving your bacon someday when the unexpected happens (and it will always happen at the worst possible moment), backups make it easy to move your data seamlessly over to your next Mac or iOS device, even if you've erased and sold off the old machine: in setting up your new device, you'll get asked if you have a backup you want to restore your files, programs, purchases, and general "stuff" from. Connect your backup drive (or point to the online backup), and before you know it you're right back where you were -- but with a newer, faster, shinier machine.
We mentioned it earlier, but we don't generally suggest using a USB "thumb" drive for this sort of stuff. They are wonderfully small, light, and easy to carry, but they also get so easily lost, or washed in the laundry, or left behind/stolen. Thumb drives can be great for transporting data between two unconnected computers, but its not a good place for your permanent archives.
Cloud services such as CrashPlan or BackBlaze can serve as the ultimate off-site backup, because not only are they outside your geographic region (thus offering further protection from natural disasters), they are multiply redundant and usually have multiple locations from where your data could be retrieved. Barring going out of business, this is one of the safest ways to store your data offsite -- but this works best if you have just a small subset of data you'd like to protect.
What if you do have a very large set of data (say a large library of your original photos) that you need to backup? Right now, hard drives and DVD media (maybe Blu-ray data discs, which can store much more) are probably your best bet, and again redundancy and diversity of locations for the safety copies is best.
The Yahoo-owned Flickr offers 1TB of free space for full-resolution photos and videos without charge, and Amazon has an "unlimited" similar service for Prime members (but it is dependent on having an ongoing $99 per year Prime membership). More familiar names like Dropbox, Copy, OneDrive and the like generally offer fairly small amounts of space for free, and cost a lot if you need a lot of space. Apple has its iCloud Photo Library, but collections larger than 200GB we think cost too much to be a semi-permanent solution.
Preserving the preservations
Depending on how much you have to back up, what type of files they are, and what format you think will still be around 25 years from now, you have a wealth of inexpensive or modestly-priced options to choose from to protect that data from the unthinkable. We've written a lot about this, and maybe you're feeling overwhelmed, but the purpose here is not to detail every possible backup strategy: it's to get you thinking about what will work best to preserve the stuff you have that really needs to be saved and protected.
One more thing, though, and it's a tip that we find most people -- even the ones who have already taken steps to secure and protect their data off-site -- often forget about: revisit your archives every so often. The reason we suggest this is that formats change, standards change, how accessible the off-site backups are for you may change, and what's important to you for saving purposes will almost certainly change -- he said, looking to his left upon a row of beautifully-kept CDs of Mac software he bought and last used 20 years ago.
Even old photos you're never going to mess with, beyond looking at them, could get lost if they're in some RAW format only that one company that went out of business 20 years ago's software can read, or if they're saved in what turns out to be the eight-track tape of data storage mediums. You may need, every decade or so, to go back and see if the way you stored your data, the medium you stored it on, or the location (real or virtual) you tucked it into is still going to be viable going into the future .
While even discontinued formats take seemingly ages to die out completely (USB floppy drives are still on the market, for pete's sake), you may well outlive some of them. Everything you think of as being associated with modern computers and data has been around only about 35 years at the most. Young people today can reasonably expect to live to be 80 or more -- think about how much change we're going to see in computing and data storage in that time. We routinely hear from readers with old AppleWorks files that nothing they have can read anymore, and let's not even talk about my box of TRS-80 floppies in NEWDOS format that has much of my early writing in SuperScripsit files. Doh!
Don't wait until you are up a foul-smelling tributary without suitable means of locomotion -- update the archives as needed to ensure they'll outlast you, or have a good shot at being recoverable by your grandchildren. Nobody can predict what might happen 25 or 50 years out, of course, but you can do what you can: for your files, stick to standard formats, and revisit that when the old "standards" fall away, long before you have no way to upgrade or convert those files.
We fear we've made this all sound like a lot of work, when for the most part it isn't -- start with a Time Machine backup for your Macs, and iCloud backups for your iOS devices. Do that first, at the very least; they are as automatic as it gets. Once that's running smoothly, think about the stuff that really needs to be preserved for the long-term, and using some of the ideas mentioned above, take a little time to secure the files that aren't going to change, make some copies, and archive them in different places.
Once every few years, or after major life changes, revisit those archives -- they may need pruning (like my set of late-90s Mac apps), they may need converting (like my old WriteNow files), or they may even need "remastering" (those photos you scanned at 72dpi a decade ago, or those CDs you ripped at 128kbps MP3 -- hopefully you still have the originals). If the data is important, these simple steps will make keeping it safe for future use or future generations -- now and later -- easy to manage.
-- Charles Martin (
@Editor_MacNN)