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Back up solutions for MBA
- Thread starter abz1981
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Hey all
I bought my password wd today. It was for windows 8, so I have formatted it using disk utility, following these instructions: http://www.iclarified.com/entry/index.php?enid=1075 provided by weaselboy.
However I have some silly questions, on step 2 on that link on the left handside i selected my external hdd, you get 2 icons though on the right, i went for the top one, as pictured and highlighted. However why is there a smaller icon below that, as some people may get confused and try click on the second smaller icon.
Also in step 4, i selected mac os extended (journaled) but other ones for mac are showing too. Why are other mac os options available.
step 6 i didn't have, however it just showed me fastest and other options, i kept it to default and went for fastest option.
Is this done all right now? As above. Also I went onto :
http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=217&sid=158&lang=en
i saw this link when i visited the website link on the document i got with the hdd. Do i really need to install all those options for my mba which is on lion?
I have done my back up to time machine, so that seemed to went okay.
sorry if questions sound silly. thanks in advance.
I bought my password wd today. It was for windows 8, so I have formatted it using disk utility, following these instructions: http://www.iclarified.com/entry/index.php?enid=1075 provided by weaselboy.
However I have some silly questions, on step 2 on that link on the left handside i selected my external hdd, you get 2 icons though on the right, i went for the top one, as pictured and highlighted. However why is there a smaller icon below that, as some people may get confused and try click on the second smaller icon.
Also in step 4, i selected mac os extended (journaled) but other ones for mac are showing too. Why are other mac os options available.
step 6 i didn't have, however it just showed me fastest and other options, i kept it to default and went for fastest option.
Is this done all right now? As above. Also I went onto :
http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=217&sid=158&lang=en
i saw this link when i visited the website link on the document i got with the hdd. Do i really need to install all those options for my mba which is on lion?
I have done my back up to time machine, so that seemed to went okay.
sorry if questions sound silly. thanks in advance.
The reason the web site has that second smaller LACIE icon there is because they had already formatted/erased the drive and called it LACIE. If you open Disk Util now and look at your drive will see the upper label that says WD 500GB whatever, then below that you will see the smaller one with whatever you named the partition you made. They did not start with a unpartitioned (blank) drive is why you see that. Sounds like you did everything correctly.
You did the right thing there in step six. Those slower options are a secure erase process that overwrites the whole drive with zeroes so nobody can recover data from the drive. For a new blank drive like you have, there is no need to do that.
Those other formatting options are in case you want to make a disk for us on other systems. For example the MS-DOS one is to format a drive to be used with Windows.
As far as all the WD software, no you don't need any of it. But it would not be a bad idea to run the OS X firmware updater to update the firmware on your new drive to the latest version.
You seem to have everything dialed in nicely.
If I was to buy an external HD to do wired backups via Time Machine, does it need to use the whole HD? Could I keep other data on it as well? But if I did that, would it be best to partition the HD so Time Machine had its own partition?
Generally how big of a backup drive do you need for a given size internal. For example, my SSD is 256.
Generally how big of a backup drive do you need for a given size internal. For example, my SSD is 256.
Yes, you can partition and keep other data on the drive just fine. You don't have to partition, but it makes things easier to manage if you do. You could just make a folder on the TM drive and dump files in there if you don't want to partition.
As far as backup size, there is not a hard rule. It really does not matter your drive size (256GB in your case), but what matters is how much data you have or think you may have on that drive. Then add a cushion on top of that for TM to keep versions of files. In my case I have a 128GB drive with only about 60GB of data on it and I add very little over time to the drive... so even if I doubled that for some versions, 120GB or so would be plenty.
To summarize, I like to use a drive/partition around 1.5 to 2.0 times the size of the amount of data I think will be involved, which is not necessarily the same as the drive size. Hope this helps.
Thx for your help. I'm still a bit confused as to how Time Machine works. If I don't keep it restricted to its own partition, and say just have it in a folder, won't it eventually use all the space on the HD in which it resides, as it continues to store my history? Or can you limit it to how much space it uses?
Also does TM make a clone of my SSD? So does it back up my system and all my apps too? When you said to just account for my data, I was thinking these needed to be included too. I've seen posts that suggest having a clone and TM, but is that really necessary??
You would not put the TM backup in a folder, you would put your extra files you want to store in a folder. Yes, TM will continue to expand to use all space on the partition, but depending on how much data you have and what kind of work you do on the machine, it can take a very very long time to expand enough to fill a partition.
Using myself again as an example, my SSD has a total 60GB used and my TM backup was started fresh in October. I just checked and total space now used by the TM backup is 75GB. So the TM drive I use would not fill for ages.
Now if you work with 10GB HD video files and versions of those are saved every hour on the hour.... one could very easily fill up a partition with TM backups.
Like I mentioned, it is easier and cleaner to manage if you make a separate partition for TM.
Yes, TM makes a complete copy (clone) of your drive, including the OS, all apps, and your personal files/documents/music etc. When I said "data", I meant all of that, not just personal data. Sorry I was not clear. Unless you specifically exclude things, every single thing on the drive gets backed up with TM. (There are some cache files that TM excludes to save unnecessary backups, but they are not needed.)
What you see people suggesting is using something like the app Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) to make a copy of your drive on a partition/drive. This "clones" the data exactly the same way TM does with one difference in the end result.
With a TM backup, if your internal drive completely dies, you would need to get a new drive installed, then you could option key boot to the TM disk and use that to restore all your data.
If that happened with CCC, you could also option key boot from the CCC backup and restore all data to the new drive... same as TM. CCC adds one feature to this scenario that may or may not be important to you. With the CCC backup you can option key boot and choose the CCC partition and the computer will actually start and run (albeit very slowly) off the external drive. This would allow you (even with a dead internal drive) to use the computer until you could get a new drive installed.
If what I described is something that would be important to you, it is not a bad idea to also do a CCC backup. You can use one drive with two partitions to do this.
Time Machine is great in that it got average people thinking about data backup. Local backups are better than nothing, don't get me wrong, but don't forget about an offsite backup as well. An offsite backup can safeguard against fires, earthquakes, floods & theft.
Quite a few options exist for offsite backup: CrashPlan, Carbonite, Backblaze and Mozy are just a few. They're all relatively cheap too.
Personally, I chose CrashPlan. One of the other things that I like about it is that you can allow family and friends to back up to your computer as well. So I have a 2TB drive in an old windows machine that is the backup server for our home media, my wife's MBP, my mom's desktop (who lives cross-country) and my future laptop. My Dropbox folder is backed up, so I have the Dropbox 30-day recovery and my own backup as well. The home media and MBP are also backed up on CrashPlan's servers too. Total, we have 400+GB backed, and we pay $14/mo for 2-10 computers.
Quite a few options exist for offsite backup: CrashPlan, Carbonite, Backblaze and Mozy are just a few. They're all relatively cheap too.
Personally, I chose CrashPlan. One of the other things that I like about it is that you can allow family and friends to back up to your computer as well. So I have a 2TB drive in an old windows machine that is the backup server for our home media, my wife's MBP, my mom's desktop (who lives cross-country) and my future laptop. My Dropbox folder is backed up, so I have the Dropbox 30-day recovery and my own backup as well. The home media and MBP are also backed up on CrashPlan's servers too. Total, we have 400+GB backed, and we pay $14/mo for 2-10 computers.
As I posted above, I keep one of my encrypted time machine backups on a little Passport drive stashed in my car.
Here's another vote for Crashplan. Love it. Unlimited backup space and cheap.
In addition to Crashplan, I keep certain files synced on Dropbox and I rotate a Time Machine backup among three different external HDDs. At least one of the three is in a different geographic location.
+ Another vote for Crashplan. You can also back up your Dropbox folder with Crashplan too, giving you an additional layer of protection. They also never delete backed up files, which is always helpful in the event you want to recover something you deleted a while back.
Coupled with local hard drive backups (Such as Time Machine, Carbon Copy Cloner etc) your backups would be bulletproof, giving you the advantages of both cloud/local backup with the disadvantages of neither
I back up to two different hard drives using SuperDuper, CarbonCopyCloner and Time Machine. One is partitioned in three, and two of those partitions have my SuperDuper and Time Machine Backup. The other hard drive has a partition with my CCC back up on it.
If I were to start all over I would leave SuperDuper out of the mix and do TM plus CCC, but I bought SD before CCC so I've just kept using it.
If I were to start all over I would leave SuperDuper out of the mix and do TM plus CCC, but I bought SD before CCC so I've just kept using it.
I use the same external hard drive as I use for my Macbook Pro. I just put the stuff into a separate folder.