On Backups

Hey Nerds. It’s time to talk about backups. Now I will fully admit that I am less than stellar about backing up my system. My MacBook Pro is set to back up automatically: locally to my Time Capsule (via Time Machine) and remotely via Carbonite. Both backups include the whole machine (which includes all of my music, photos, and documents as well as the iTunes backups for both iPhones). So, I’ve pretty much got everything covered. Right?

I was complacent, if not comfortable, with this arrangement being my only backup(s) until…

I just read Gruber’s account of how diligent, and correctly implemented, backups saved everything on his MacBook Pro when the hard drive started coughing up blood. And he had a lot of stuff that was critical to his work on the machine. Then I read Merlin’s follow uppiece (yeah, I’m following Merlin again. I got over it.) in which he elaborates on exactly what you should be doing, right now, to back up your ones and zeros.

Thing is, hard drives do fail. If you have a traditional, spinning-disk hard drive it will die. The only question is when it will go. One day you’ll start up your machine and hear the “click of death” and that’s all she wrote. 

It isn’t like I haven’t had drives fail on me before, either. My first catastrophic failure was in pharmacy school. My Dell laptop (well, there’s your problem) went kaput one morning, click-of-death style. I had a fair amount of music and a few photos on there. But the inconvenience was the worst part. Try going through a semester of grad school without your only computer. No good.

My second dead drive happened just a couple of years ago. I had all of my music and photos stored on an external drive connected to my iBook (bought to replace the Dell). Of course, I had very little of it backed up — about half of the music and none of the photos. That was the precarious situation when my labrador decided to jump up and run for the door one night — through the firewire cable connecting the drive to the iBook — sending the drive ass-over-tea-kettle to the ground. Turns out 18 inches is a long way for 300 GB to fall.

So, I’ve taken the steps to back up over my network to the Time Capsule and over the internet to Carbonite. But I think I need to take my backups to the next level. I will feel more comfortable when I have the whole process under my total control. So, over the next few months I’ll be working toward what Merlin calls the Holy Trinity:

If it’s not automated, it’s not a real backup.
If it’s not redundant, it’s not a real backup.
If it’s not regularly rotated off-site, it’s not a real backup.

I’ll be gathering and implementing an array of external drives and Drobo-housed internal drives, on- and off-site, all run by SuperDuper and Automator. This will be quite a process and I’ll document it all here. Here’s hoping that my current system holds until I can get everything in place. Here’s to backups.