Apple's Time Machine and the Time Capsule I bought to use it on are the best things I've ever purchased that I've immediately forgotten, and didn't even realize I was using. I'm not sure what I did to backup anything before that came along, but I do have a big, big box of neatly-labelled floppy discs in my office, and no way to use them. Well, that's not quite true: I have used a couple as coasters for my tea mug. It's startling to think that I have several years of data on those discs that are effectively lost to me -- I could get them back with a concerted effort, and spending some money -- whereas in theory I now have multiple years of data available to me in an instant.
I say it's theoretical because, while it's true that I can retrieve anything and it's true that if you stole my iMac I wouldn't lose any of the data, it isn't true that this is because I have Time Machine. I bought a 1TB Time Capsule just about as soon as they came out in 2008, and it was installed in moments, I had a spot for it in the house. We used to refer to it as the Bucket under the Stairs, and all our Macs would backup to it.
I do now have an external drive directly connected to my iMac, which in homage I call the Pail, but the Bucket got a hole in it. After several years of working so steadily that I barely thought about it and rarely grabbed anything back from it, the hard drive stopped working. It happens, and it's bad news, but I'm pretty sure I haven't lost anything. I've kept the unit, and maybe I can retrieve some data, but it doesn't feel urgent. There's nothing obviously missing from any of our Macs.
Actually, that's a thought: I more often used the Bucket as a mechanism for moving big files between our Macs. I can't even fathom why I didn't just use Wi-Fi to connect Mac to Mac, but for some reason it was handier to dump files to the Bucket and grab them back from the other Mac later. We had a folder on there that was just for this temporary kind of transfer, and we called that the Transport Buffer.
I did use that a lot. Far more than I ever did try to get data back from Time Machine. However, I did try on occasion, and it did work, and it did save my bacon once or twice over the years. So you'd have to call it flawless up to the end: recovery worked perfectly, and backing up worked so seamlessly that I forget how often it was set to do that.
Backing up happened in the background, so you could forget it. Recovery is different. Partly because you are making a positive choice, a deliberate effort to recover some document from your backup, but partly because Time Machine was so gaudy that you couldn't forget it. The moving starfield and the rolling copies of windows, it was pretty tastelessly un-pretty. However, it was also superbly clear: the first time you did anything, you understood the whole concept of backing up and retrieving documents from yesterday, last week, last month.
The second time you did anything, you understood the whole concept of how very slow this all was.
Yet there must be something in showing me this so simply and having it work so well. For before Time Machine, I knew about backups, I understood about backups, I just didn't do them. After Time Machine, I backed up everything.
When the Bucket under the Stairs took its final kicking, I didn't replace it. That's about two years ago now, and I still haven't replaced it. Well, there is that external hard drive I plug into my iMac, but that's more an emergency boot disk. That's a thought: I must get into the habit of backing up to it, and then unplugging that disk, storing it somewhere safe.
That doesn't seem remotely urgent, though, and this general lack of urgency in my backup life is not down to my
laissez-faire attitude to data, it's more that I've moved to online backups. There are many of these, but I've bought
Backblaze for our two main Macs in the house.
At the time, our Internet connection was so slow that the initial backup -- when Backblaze makes its first copy of all of your data -- took a rather long time. Eleven months, to be specific. We had a little party when it finished.
But now we have vastly faster Internet connection here where I am in the UK, and again I don't remember how often Backblaze backs up. I just know that it does, and that it doesn't slow down my Mac while it's doing it. It doesn't slow down Angela's Mac either. It just does its doings, and every month we get emailed a report of just how much data we've backed up, then every year we get an astonishingly small bill. It's about $50, so call it $100 for the two Macs. I can't find how much the original UK pricing was for Time Capsule, but I think it was £249, or $365. Given that I had it for about five years, that's cheaper than
Backblaze or
Crashplan or any of these. it's cheaper by far. It's also faster: pulling data off a disk under your stairs is always going to be gigantically faster than downloading it all back across the Internet.
However.
That Time Capsule I bought to use with Time Machine had a capacity of 1TB. My iMac now has 3TB in it, and 6TB in external drives connected to it. Backblaze backs up them all.
I learnt how to backup from Time Machine and the Time Capsule, but my needs and my use outstripped that. Hopefully I would've turned to online backup eventually, and I suspect my growing use of
Dropbox contributed to my appreciating how data can be stored and retrieved so quickly. However, I certainly owe my backing up to Apple's Time Machine and Time Capsule.
-- William Gallagher (
@WGallagher)
(Editor's note: you may be seeing a trend of backup-related articles. We'll be doing a series of a few articles in the coming weeks about backup solutions, why you should have them, and what you should be accomplishing with a good scheme -- including how there's no "one fits all" solution. Look for them in the coming weeks.)