Backup Software/Services for MBA

[jimboutilier]

What are other folks using for their backup needs for their MBA?

Up to now I've been doing a weekly image backup via SuperDuper augmented by an online daily incremental backup using Carbonate.

I like image backups because in the event of an HD failure I can boot from my image and try a repair or replacement and recovery knowing I have an absolutely complete image of everything.

But not wanting to loose up to a week or more of work in the event of a failure I want a daily backup too. I've used Mozy in the past but it had reliability issues and did not seem to cope well with intermittent connections. Carbonite has been great but it uses quite a bit of CPU on a fairly frequent basis so keeps the MBA hot with fans blasting so I find it unacceptable on the Air. I've tried iDrive and is seems low overhead but again does not seem to deal well with intermittent connections.

I fly a lot and am always going from location to location and network to network. Any suggestions on low overhead backup services that deal well with intermittent connections?

 

[aristobrat]

Is using an inexpensive portable USB drive and Time Machine not an option for the periods between your full images?

 

[jimboutilier]

Is using an inexpensive portable USB drive and Time Machine not an option for the periods between your full images?

That may be what I settle on. But I don't like TimeMachine and traveling with more stuff and having to remember and take the time to explicitly do backups each day is what I hope to avoid using a service.

Thanks for the suggestion.

 

[AndyMulhearn]

I fly a lot and am always going from location to location and network to network. Any suggestions on low overhead backup services that deal well with intermittent connections?

Have you looked at rsync? You need a remote file system, like idisk, and then you can use a quick shell prompt to replicate your data to the remote disk.

This the backup I have running at the moment:

rsync -avzu --progress /Users/AndyMulhearn/Documents/* /Volumes/unxmully/Documents/

And it's using sod all CPU - temps around 60C and fans at 1800. It works well with broken connections - you just reconnect and start it again and it it picks up where left off.

 

[fluffyx]

Backblaze.com is amazing. Try it out. $5/month for unlimited backup storage.