How do you backup your computer

weekly clones of my hdd
hourly backups with time machine

for important work, I also utilize dropbox synching between my personal and work (which has time machine backups) as well as applescripts that write drop box contents to a flash drive...effectively giving me 6 up to date backups split across 2 locations

learned the hard way once with not backing up.

I back up locally via Time Machine to an external HDD attached to my Airport Extreme Base Station. I also back up to Carboinite. The satisfies my off-site requirement. Only backing up locally is not a reliable backup option.

Pro to this setup:

1. Dead easy to restore from both solutions.
2. Never have to connect any wires to backup data.
3. My most recent backups are generally only a few minutes or hours old.
4. From both solutions, I can restore older versions of files or files that were deleted recently.
5. The Carbonite mobile app allows me to access my backups from iphone/ipad.
6. Very cheap - $59/year for Carbonite unlimted storage.
7. Carbonite still backs things up when I am on the road.

Cons to this setup:

1. Can only do a full system restore from Time Machine backups. Carbonite only backs up data. And since I do Time Machine with a drive attached to a router, a full restore is very slow. My wife's hard drive in her Macbook died recently and it took about 24 hours to do a full restore from the Time Machine back up when wired to the router.
2. Inital backups both to Carbonite and to the external drive attached to Airport Extreme take a long time.
3. Carbonite does not backup video files by default. I have to manually select video files not in the iPhoto library and make sure they are included in the back up.

Overall, I am pretty happy with this solution and the few times I needed to use my backups, I was able to recover with minimal or no loss of data. That being said, I am always looking out for other solutions. To me, the big reason that I like this setup is no wires. I never have to remember to plug an external drive in to do the scheduled back up. But if you have a desktop or always have an external plugged in, that isn't as much of an issue.

slu said:

I back up locally via Time Machine to an external HDD attached to my Airport Extreme Base Station. I also back up to Carboinite. The satisfies my off-site requirement. Only backing up locally is not a reliable backup option.

Pro to this setup:

1. Dead easy to restore from both solutions.
2. Never have to connect any wires to backup data.
3. My most recent backups are generally only a few minutes or hours old.
4. From both solutions, I can restore older versions of files or files that were deleted recently.
5. The Carbonite mobile app allows me to access my backups from iphone/ipad.
6. Very cheap - $59/year for Carbonite unlimted storage.
7. Carbonite still backs things up when I am on the road.

Cons to this setup:

1. Can only do a full system restore from Time Machine backups. Carbonite only backs up data. And since I do Time Machine with a drive attached to a router, a full restore is very slow. My wife's hard drive in her Macbook died recently and it took about 24 hours to do a full restore from the Time Machine back up when wired to the router.
2. Inital backups both to Carbonite and to the external drive attached to Airport Extreme take a long time.
3. Carbonite does not backup video files by default. I have to manually select video files not in the iPhoto library and make sure they are included in the back up.

Overall, I am pretty happy with this solution and the few times I needed to use my backups, I was able to recover with minimal or no loss of data. That being said, I am always looking out for other solutions. To me, the big reason that I like this setup is no wires. I never have to remember to plug an external drive in to do the scheduled back up. But if you have a desktop or always have an external plugged in, that isn't as much of an issue.

Click to expand...

RE: Bolded section above. My understanding is that you could have taken the Time Machine HDD from your router, and attached it directly to your wife's computer for the restore. I would have been faster.

I think you are very smart to use a combination of local and automatic cloud based backup. Personally... I think the vast majority of solutions discussed in this thread are poor advice.

/Jim

Partitioned usb3 drive for CCC and time machine. But, I don't have all media on computers, have another drive as master file of media and archive of old work files.

I use Time Machine for my backups. I have a 1TB USB drive for it. Though I'm about to purchase a 3TB RAID 0 external drive setup so I can move my ever-growing iTunes library to it.

flynz4 said:

RE: Bolded section above. My understanding is that you could have taken the Time Machine HDD from your router, and attached it directly to your wife's computer for the restore. I would have been faster.

I think you are very smart to use a combination of local and automatic cloud based backup. Personally... I think the vast majority of solutions discussed in this thread are poor advice.

/Jim

Click to expand...

I tried that and did a little research on it. What is comes down to is if you do your Time Machine back up over the network, you cannot just plug the drive in via USB and restore. You have to restore from the network as well. I hard wired her into the router, which made it faster, but it still took a while day for about 500 GB of data.

slu said:

I tried that and did a little research on it. What is comes down to is if you do your Time Machine back up over the network, you cannot just plug the drive in via USB and restore. You have to restore from the network as well. I hard wired her into the router, which made it faster, but it still took a while day for about 500 GB of data.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the update. I've only used Time Capsules... so I had never tried mixing "direct attached" and "network attached" methods. I stand corrected.

/Jim