What's Your Backup Plan?

[Grimace]

Differentiating backups is also important. Even if you only backup JPEG copies of everything onto DVD-R every 6 months, that could be the failsafe if an electrical storm zaps your computer or some sci-fi electromagnetic pulse renders all electronics useless!

I got burned once and lost everything. Never again.

 

[Clix Pix]

I have several external HDs -- G-Drives -- to protect my images and important documents and I manually back up to one or two of them regularly, but I have yet to actually set up Time Machine. I'm not sure why but somehow I don't trust it....? I also have in the Mac Pro one HD for storage and one HD for the Aperture vault, and that also has been backed up to an external drive, too.

 

[firestarter]

I have several external HDs -- G-Drives -- to protect my images and important documents and I manually back up to one or two of them regularly, but I have yet to actually set up Time Machine. I'm not sure why but somehow I don't trust it....? I also have in the Mac Pro one HD for storage and one HD for the Aperture vault, and that also has been backed up to an external drive, too.

I think the main benefit of Time Machine is that most folk are too forgetful/lazy to do manual backups - and Time Machine 'just works'.

It also protects against some interesting scenarios... what if you accidentally wrote changes into a file, or a file became corrupted? Most of the backup schemes people are recommended would result in this corruption being written to the backup, and the original lost. At least Time Machine does versioning - and would potentially help in this case.


Since the OP has his answer, I'll try a little thread derail.

I often shoot 10 to 15GB of images in a day. I come home and copy them to the HDD, but I'd really like to archive these raw files to some sort of write-once storage too, just for extra security. I used to write shoots to DVD, but for this amount of storage DVD has become inconvenient.

Is anyone out there using Blu Ray for backups? The writers seem pretty cheap, and the blank disks are now very cheap (for a 25GB write once disk).

 

[mynewromantica]

JNB - your advice is good, but I have to pick you up on the Mozy bit.

A backup isn't any good unless you've actually tested that you can restore from it. It's a pain, but unless you DO actually test that Mozy data - you could be in for a big disappointment if you need to rely on it.

No joke. I had HUGE problems trying to get my data back from Mozy. Mozy breaks your large amounts of files into smaller chunks. This causes huge problems with things like an iPhoto or Aperture Library, which is looking for things to be in very specific spots. When my HDD died I had to deal with Mozy for a few weeks to get my data back and eventually had to download about 30 different smaller zip files and piece my libraries back together by hand. Which ended up not even working 100% in the end. I would not recommend Mozy if getting your libraries back is REALLY important.

 

[ChrisA]

..
Has anyone partitioned a large drive to run Time Machine and manual backup on the same physical drive?.

I would hope not to many people do this. It's pointless. Let Time Machine have the entire drive.

There are some rules and if your backup system follows them you are pretty much safe.

1) The data should always exist on at least three different phyasical media and
2) The data should always exist in at least two different geographic locations.

"Always means even while the backup is copied or transported. Some backup programs wipe the disk clean before they start. Be rotation system will have two disks in the sam e place. So because of these types of things the "always" requirement might mean you need four different physical media

Always think of the "threats" what is it you are protecting from. Common causes of data loss are (1) Theft of equipment, (2) fire or flood, (3) operators error (4) Software bug causes coruption of data, (5) disk failure,....

A very simple system is to have three 1TB drives and use each one with Time Machne. You rotate them so that one in connected to the computer and updates automatically, one is in a fire safe in a differnt room and one is at the office. Every week or two you rotate them. Time Machine will take a few hours to update the drive

 

[funkboy]

Definitely don't forget the off-site part -- a fire, theft, flood, etc are very real threats!

I am still working out the best back-up plan for myself, too. I have the advantage of running my own servers, so I can "rsync" up to there as well.

Agree with all of that. I have a dedicated server with OVH that costs me 20€/month with a 250gb disk. That's the offsite backup I rsync my stuff to.

 

[Shuttleworth]

I'm just in the process of moving my managed library to referenced on my new Drobo. Now my Aperture library will still contain the previews and thumbnails in JPEG form, it just won't have the RAW files in there. From what I've seen, when you create a vault of a referenced library, it still contains the Preview JPEGS (IIRC in a managed library the vault doesn't back-up the previews and thumbnails, to reduce its size)

If I can get the library size small enough, I think it may be possible to put a vault on my iDisc, which would give me instant offsite backup of my high quality previews. Ok they aren't the original quality, but with family photo's for example, so long as they look good on a decent monitor, they will suffice.

I'll still be doing a full offsite backup of my referenced originals on an external hard drive.