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TMC Blog - How & Why to Back Up Your System The MUG Center Way, Part 4
Writings, ramblings, proclamations and prognostications from the front lines of the Apple community.
More time has passed than I intended for the next in my blog postings on effective backups. Two factors contributed to this, both for the better.
First, Tiger arrived and necessitated some changes in backup software selection. Second, the first and second and third parts of Why & How to Back Up Your System The MUG Center Way drew lots of interest, emails, recommendations, shared backup strategies and more that a number of them had to be investigated before going on.
Catching Up
In first three installments we covered how you can calculate the value of your backups, goals to consider when developing your backup strategy, hardware and software options, and part of my own personal strategy. We still have the question of Shemp, the fourth hard drive in my schedule, backup archives and much more.
Tiger Clones?
Upgrading to Tiger has been nothing but a pleasure, with one notable exception: The new version of the Mac OS broke one of the key software choices in my personal backup regimine: Carbon Copy Cloner by Bombich Software. Mike Bombich posted to his web site that he would be unable to update CCC for the forseeable future, so alternatives had to be found. At first, that meant Apple's included Disk Utility. Effective, but not nearly as convenient. Then Super Duper came on the scene.
Super Duper creates the requisiste full clones of my hard drives, but does much more. Clones can be updated incrementally to keep them current and save the time associated with a full cloning process. Your system can be "checkpointed" to roll back to a previous system in the event of a problem. At $19.95, this is a great program to have in your backup toolkit and deserves serious consideration.
Then, a funny thing happened. Apple updated Tiger to 10.4.2 and whatever broke Carbon Copy Cloner was fixed. CCC works just fine after the upgrade, so I'm left with two great options for the full clone part of my strategy. All is right with the universe once again.
A small note on Super Duper before moving on: as noted in an earlier installment, one of the main reasons I do full clones is to assure that I can always go back to a working, stable version of my system software in the event of a crisis. Super Duper's "checkpoint" option delivers this as well, but on the same backup drive. I'm still more comfortable with a separate clone on a separate physical drive. If you have the luxury of multiple drives, great! If not, then look into the checkpoint option to achieve the same goal with only one drive.
Where For Art Thou, Shemp?
In Part 3 we talked about the functions of the first three hard drives in my backup schedule, Moe, Larry and Curly. The fourth, Shemp, serves an essential function: off-site backup.
Three years ago I came home from our MUG's annual holiday party to find my street lit up like Times Square and part of my townhouse building doing a great impersonation of a Yule log. One of the neighbors allegedly decided that their Christmas tree would look lovely with candles under the tree.
After waiting for a few hours, I was escorted into my unit by the firefighters. Hard drive backups weren't on my mind that night as I gathered up some clothes, perhaps because my PowerBook was with me at the party. But if it hadn't been? All my diligence in having multple backups could have been inadequate.
I was lucky. Out of sixteen units in my building mine was one of only four that were habitable within a few days, and I escaped with only a little roof damage and some smoke issues. But the experience left me realizing that I needed an off-site backup option.
That's when Shemp joined the family. Shemp sits on the desk at my office and gets connected every day to run a manual incremental backup while I'm either in a meeting or at lunch, just like Curly at home.
With Shemp in place I have two daily backups at any given moment, approximately twelve hours apart, and two completely cloned, separate drives that allow me to go back as far as two weeks to either earlier versions of documents and projects or to stable, working versions of the operating system. Any of these four drives can be pressed into service as a boot drive simply by plugging it in, either for my existing PowerBook or even a new one, should something really go awry.
Are We There Yet?
No, not just yet. In the next installment we'll cover archival backups for hyper-critical data, some thoughts on backing up your music and photo collections and a new backup utility that is so good it should have been part of the MacOS.
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