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Backups
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Addicted to MacNN
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Sorry, not sure if this is the right Forum for this.
A mate of mine had his PC nicked (among other things) and he said that the worst thing was not having a backup of his photos outside of his house - they nicked the DVDs that he had backed up the photos on. SO ... I'm revisiting my backup solution and wanted feedback / advice / criticism.
I've got an external (WD MyBook) hooked up to the iMac and using TimeMachine. I'm going to buy 2 portable external hard drives (probably WD Passport Studios) and I'm going to backup all important files once a week (eg on Thursday) and then take the drive to work. The other drive will be used with either Carbon Copy Cloner or Super Duper for a clone backup. When Thursday comes, I'll backup the important files and then swap the drive with the one at work.
Unless I've miscalculated I should have covered all bases : Time Machine backups on the permanently attached MyBook. The hard drive at work will have a copy of all my important files, and the second portable hard drive will have a clone that I can boot from if the internal hard drive dies.
So, what would you guys and gals recommend for the 'clone' backups? CCC or Super Duper?
Am I missing something in my backup solution?
Should thieves of Apple hardware be castrated?
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Professional Poster
Join Date: Oct 2008
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I would look at Jungle disk for some cheap off site backup. Given that you will not be generating a large amount of changed file data day on day, even having a nightly upload shouldn't break the bank, and if it looks like it might you can always schedule a weekly upload instead.
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I have Jungle Disk with Amazon S3 behind it and from my experience its too long. I'm not sure if its because I'm in France, but when I tried doing the iTunes library it took longer than a weekend. And my library has grown since. I have 200G of data that needs backing up now.
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Join Date: May 2001
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I use Synk Standard for that.
I have a second external harddrive at my parents' home that I update once a month. It doesn't just clone, it does incremental updates.
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I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it.
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Clinically Insane
Join Date: Jun 2001
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Ok, so I just found out that Dreamhost now allows 50GB for personal backups. Great deal.
See more in my thread here.
-t
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Right now the only data I truly fear losing is photos. So I keep a (sometimes) weekly backup of iPhoto in the car in an encrypted sparseimage on an iPod. But I just used AppleScript Folder Actions on the Volumes folder to run rsync (sometimes) automagically when the iPod connects. Nothing fancy. But for some reason I sometimes have to run it manually.
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Originally Posted by turtle777
Ok, so I just found out that Dreamhost now allows 50GB for personal backups. Great deal.
See more in my thread here.
-t
Yeah, if your data isn't all that important.
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Clinically Insane
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Originally Posted by besson3c
Yeah, if your data isn't all that important.
It's a secondary backup to my primary backups, which I keep on Time Machine.
Chances are slim that my primary computer and Time Machine both fail, and Dreamhost loses the data at the same time.
-t
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Originally Posted by turtle777
It's a secondary backup to my primary backups, which I keep on Time Machine.
Chances are slim that my primary computer and Time Machine both fail, and Dreamhost loses the data at the same time.
-t
That's cool, although I'm not sure how practical it would be for me and my ridiculously slow Comcast upload speed. I'd rather stuff a hard drive into a spare computer and rsync to it, although maybe someday I ought to look into buying more bandwidth from Comcast. I don't like the idea of giving Comcast more money, but it would be nice to have.
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Clinically Insane
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The problem with your backup strategy: if you don't physically remove your HD from your home every time, you are not safe in case of a fire or theft.
-t
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There will be one external hard drive physically attached all the time. This is being used by Time Machine. The two other hard drives will swap from being : at work and at home but with either a Super Duper or Carbon Copy Cloner backup on it. Once a week I will backup all important files to the home-based external, erasing the Super Duper or CCC backup and I will take it to work. The hard drive at work will then come home.
I won't be using a 'cloud based' backup solution because (in my experience) its too slow - I need the important file backup to last no more than 9 hours.
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Super Duper doesn't do incremental backups, I recommend you use another software for that (e. g. Synk).*
* Note that many people use incremental backup in the wrong sense: they think of `quick updates,' i. e. only files which have been changed are copied. An incremental backup saves older versions of your file (this is not the case with Super Duper).
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OreoCookie, cheers looks like Synk Standard is what I'll use.
Of course if I have any problems then I'll PM you
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Hehe, ok, no prob. Synk is quite cheap (if you take the cheapest version, I have the Standard edition). In theory, you can have it scheduled, the Pro version even allows 1-to-N backups (you could back up to two harddrives simultaneously.
Edit: Oh, I've also found a free software called Mathusalem which is supposed to do the same thing. It's hosted by google and looks like a decent project. You may want to have a look at that first.
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Last edited by OreoCookie; Dec 1, 2008 at 10:30 AM.
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I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it.
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Disk Utility's Restore is free. Its clones are rock solid. Partition a big disk into several smaller chunks to which you clone to. That way you get bootable clones, with some history. It's a great addition to a TM/TC backup. And it's free too.
It's part of every OS X installation. It's even on the OS XS install disk, IOW always available.
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Originally Posted by mattyb
Sorry, not sure if this is the right Forum for this.
A mate of mine had his PC nicked (among other things) and he said that the worst thing was not having a backup of his photos outside of his house - they nicked the DVDs that he had backed up the photos on. SO ... I'm revisiting my backup solution and wanted feedback / advice / criticism.
I've got an external (WD MyBook) hooked up to the iMac and using TimeMachine. I'm going to buy 2 portable external hard drives (probably WD Passport Studios) and I'm going to backup all important files once a week (eg on Thursday) and then take the drive to work. The other drive will be used with either Carbon Copy Cloner or Super Duper for a clone backup. When Thursday comes, I'll backup the important files and then swap the drive with the one at work.
Unless I've miscalculated I should have covered all bases : Time Machine backups on the permanently attached MyBook. The hard drive at work will have a copy of all my important files, and the second portable hard drive will have a clone that I can boot from if the internal hard drive dies.
So, what would you guys and gals recommend for the 'clone' backups? CCC or Super Duper?
Am I missing something in my backup solution?
Should thieves of Apple hardware be castrated?
I've been using CCC forever as my backup solution. I tried Super Duper but it seemed to have too many hiccups that prevented reliable (e.g.: I don't have to think about them) backups. and the 3.x versions of CCC have a nice scheduler feature built-in that works like a champ. Every day at 08:00 I do an incremental backup of my /Users directory and on Sunday at 0800 I do a full backup of the whole internal HD.
One problem I had that might effect you is that CCC uses disk name and/or disk id to find the backup disc. There is a setting in there that lets you use just disc name only so that you can swap out discs and not have the backup fail.
<edited to add>
I have my incremental backup copy files that changed *without* doing a backup of the previous version. CCC does offer the option to do an archive/save of changed files on the backup disc but that is not important to me. If I work on something where versioning is really important to me I accomplish that task with saving the versioned copies of the files separately. (For example, my thesis has 11 different versions on my computer so if I want to go back to a previous version I have the older, separate file as a reference.)
And yes, my suggestion does not take into account fire or theft. If the house burns down I lose my iMac and my backup.
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Last edited by dcmacdaddy; Dec 2, 2008 at 10:49 PM.
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My solution is to carry a small USB external 2.5 drive case with a large laptop HD in it with me any time I'm not at home. They now have 500G ones for $99. I use SuperDuper, but will maybe revert to CCC, my first BU utility, after reading some of the posts. BTW, if you are using a USB hub, make sure it is externally powered.
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Yeah, I was paranoid enough that I moved virtually everything to work on an external drive. Fire/theft odds are as good as drive failure or lightning strike.
I don't update the offsite storage often enough, but I wouldn't lose EVERYTHING.
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When a true genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him. -- Jonathan Swift.
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Bought myself a 320G WD My Passport Studio which has both Firewire 400 and USB. I'll fool around with it tonight.
Cheers for the replies, keep the suggestions coming!
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I've been using both Time Machine and SuperDuper, each on a different external HD. My strategy was having different backup utilities. SuperDuper had failed when I incorrectly used it to back up. I've since learned how to use it and check that it is a good backup (Booting up via the external HD). Recently I purchased an iMac and am using only TIme Machine with one external HD. After reading in these entries I am thinking about using CCC with its incremental backup ability. I'll daisy-chain the HDs together. Any suggestions for a strategy regarding rotating a third HD for ultimate safety?
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rdisk is free and already on the Mac. Most programs simply "package" rsync
type "man rsync" to lean the command from the terminal window.
rsync does it all
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Clinically Insane
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If you are not familiar with the terminal, rsync, scp etc... will be too high of a learning curve.
For simple incremental backups a la TimeMachine, use Methusalem, FTW.
-t
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I liked the look of Mathusalem, but -- after reading this -- it won't do for me:
Information about Mathusalem limitations ...two of which are:
: • Mathusalem does not preserve owner and permissions on files or directories
• It does not preserve extended attributes on directories, but preserves them on files
re: preserves them on files
I wonder if "preserves" means they are copied the first time AND also tracked for changes.
...Or, that they are copied the first time, but NOT tracked for subsequent (xattr) changes.[?]
(i.e., would changing a file's metadata cause that same change to be "backed up"?)
Also see the questions/comments which follow on that page,
including this answer/info from one of the developers: Mathusalem does not use rsync but a custom backup file engine.
Oh well, it is free after all. So . . .
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For incremental backups, check out QRecall <http://www.qrecall.com/>. Handles extended attributes and even captures and restores hard links. Can also restore an entire system.
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I vote carbon copy cloner
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Clinically Insane
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Originally Posted by Hal Itosis
I liked the look of Mathusalem, but -- after reading this -- it won't do for me:
Information about Mathusalem limitations ...two of which are:
: • Mathusalem does not preserve owner and permissions on files or directories
• It does not preserve extended attributes on directories, but preserves them on files
Oh well, it is free after all. So . . .
Well, isn't that sort of a given, if you'd back up to FTP / SFTP server ?
For local backups (to a HD), it's a different matter.
-t
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Clinically Insane
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Originally Posted by JBucanek
For incremental backups, check out QRecall <http://www.qrecall.com/>. Handles extended attributes and even captures and restores hard links. Can also restore an entire system.
Looks interesting.
-t
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