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TMC Blog - How & Why to Back Up Your System The MUG Center Way, Part 3
Writings, ramblings, proclamations and prognostications from the front lines of the Apple community.
The first and second parts of Why & How to Back Up Your System The MUG Center Way, talked provided some thoughts on why you need to backup your Mac, how to quantify the potential value of those backups, in both time and money, determine your goals for your backup strategy, and discussed some recommendations for hardware and software to effectively implement that strategy.
This time, I want to share my personal strategy, not as the perfect solution, but as the one that works for me, and hopefully will give you some ideas on developing your own.
Hardware Set-Up
My four backup hard drives are labeled (with yellow stickies taped to the cases) with names that make them easy to distinguish, and have some subtle meanings: Moe, Larry, Curly and Shemp. Before you laugh, consider that Moe and Larry were always the core of the famous comedy team, making them easy to group together mentally. Those two drives are the core, weekly backup drives. Moe gets used for Week 1, Larry is used for Week 2. Curly is my daily backup drive, and is for incremental backups. It is also the largest in capacity of the four...for obvious reasons. What about Shemp? We'll save his story for later.
As each drive is used, it is erased completely with Disk Utility and renamed with the date of the backup. For example, Moe might be named PowerBook Backup - 5-1-05, and Larry is PowerBook Backup 5-8-05. Curly is titled, PowerBook Daily - 3-15-05, with the date representing the last time it was completely reformatted." Curly obviously isn't renamed as often as the others, but it is good to know when it was "started," since it holds the incremental daily backups.
The Methodology - Weekly
Remember that one of my key goals is not to have backup procedures interfere with my production time. That means letting backups run when the PowerBook is not in use.
Tuesday is my backup night, for no good reason except that it fits my schedule. The last thing I do before shutting down for the night is to set up the backup. That requires me to:
- Plug in Moe or Larry (depending on the week) and run Disk Utility to erase and rename the drive with the day's date.
- Restart my PowerBook. Why? Because I have a bad habit of having 20 or so programs open at any given time, and I always seem to forget to quit one or another. Open programs can interrupt a backup program, especially if a file is actively in use (your email database, for example). A restart guarantees that nothing is running.
- Start Carbon Copy Cloner, entering the administrator password and click "Clone."
All of that takes about three minutes, and the only real waiting is for the restart. In the morning, my drive is completely cloned. I have a bootable copy of my data, programs and working environment that could be plugged into another Mac if necessary. (In Part 1 I told you it was recently necessary.) The backup drive is ejected and put into its storage location, with the power cable disconnected. There's no need to risk a random power spike taking out a backup that hopefully will never have to be used.
Each week the process is repeated, rotating between Moe and Larry. It is easy to be sure that I am indeed rotating drives since they are named with their respective dates.
The Methodology - Daily
Because of the amount of information on my PowerBook that changes on a daily basis (email, document from the office, updates to The MUG Center, etc.), weekly backups just aren't enough. I can potentially lose seven days worth of data if something happens to the drive early on a Tuesday evening.
That's why Curly sits on the desk, always at the ready. Each night it is connected, and Retrospect runs an incremental backup at 2 AM. With that, I'm down to only about 24 hours of potential data loss if a catastrophic failure occurs.
An Ounce of Prevention
Because I have a 100% current cloned copy of my Powerbook each Wednesday morning, it is the perfect time to perform some routine drive maintenance. In the very unlikely event that something goes wrong, I can immediately revert to a copy of my drive that was in good working order.
Between cursing the alarm clock and starting to work out, I take the time to fire up Cocktail. While I'm trying to stay healthy, so is my Mac. Caches are cleaned, permissions repaired, and other maintenance activities are performed.
Every few weeks Cocktail is replaced with Disk Warrior at this stage, to take care of any other issues that might be cropping up. Disk Warrior is a different type of disk utility than Cocktail and addresses different potential problems. Alternating between the two keeps you covered.
By the time breakfast is ready, I've got just one more item on my weekly backup and maintenance agenda. Arguably the most frequently changed and most fragile file on your Mac is your email program's database. Whether you use Apple's Mail, Microsoft Entourage, or my choice, CTM Development's PowerMail, it deserves special attention.
In Mail, it is called "Rebuild Mailbox" (Mailbox > Rebuild). In Entourage, hold down the Option key when starting the program, or run the Database Utility that came with Office. For PowerMail, the option is "Compact Mailbox (File > Database > Compact Database). The length of the process depends on the size of your mail database, but the investment in time is well worth not having issues with your email program.
Both my PowerBook and I are ready to start the day at about the same time. The odds of having any problems have been reduced by the weekly maintenance, and if issues do crop up (a failing hard drive, for instance), I've got three bootable copies of my drive to fall back on. Even better, I can go back up to two weeks and retrieve older copies of files should the need arise.
Is That All?
Oh no, there's more. Don't forget about Shemp. In the next installment we'll see where the fourth drive fits in, talk about backup archives, some changes in procedure necessitated by Tiger, and more.
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