Backup Method

[yeg780]

Hello,

I've been lurking around this forum for awhile but have never posted anything before.

Here's my question about a backup method (after having read some stories about people not backing up properly):

- I want a simple backup of my iTunes, iPhoto, and documents. Could I just copy them manually to two external drives (one to keep at home, one to keep at work) and rotate them on a weekly basis? Or, should I use a program such as Carbon Copy Cloner? Bookmarks, contacts, and mail are synced to my phone and I don't care for preferences and settings, just the three areas mentioned.

Thank you in advance for your help,

 

[yeg780]

Anyone have any suggestions?

 

[TheBaconKing]

With Carbon Copy Cloner you can select which folders to backup if you don't want to back everything up. It will automatically backup any new files, so using two drives shouldn't be an issue.

 

[yeg780]

With Carbon Copy Cloner you can select which folders to backup if you don't want to back everything up. It will automatically backup any new files, so using two drives shouldn't be an issue.

Thanks,

I'll give it a try!

 

[r0k]

I use several backup strategies.

For convenience, I use Time Machine backups to a Time Capsule. For redundance, I also make Time Machine backups to a local firewire disk.

I use crashplan (paid version) to save documents. Crashplan saved my wife's data when I tried to restore from the Time Capsule only to find the backup had become corrupted. I was able to bring everything she really cared about back from crashplan.

I have photos on a local firewire drive and copies on a NAS drive. I DON'T allow iPhoto to copy photos to iPhoto Library when I import them.

In addition to the above, I manually copy important files to mobile me and now to dropbox.

I had a bad experience with copying iPhoto Library. iPhoto started getting slow. I had 67 gig of photos and videos in iPhoto Library and if I launched iMovie, it would freeze forever trying to import every video in my iPhoto Library. For this reason, I created a second, mostly empty iPhoto library that I would make active before attempting to run iMovie. It was then that I decided it was time to "back up" my iPhoto library by copying the whole thing to a usb drive. After copying it, I deleted the original. Bad idea. The copy was corrupt. The original might have been corrupted but I'll never know. This is why I no longer allow iPhoto to copy photos in to its library. I have a similar approach to iTunes. I don't allow iTunes to make copies of mp3 files I've bought elsewhere or ripped.

I used CCC to make clones of drives when upgrading but I haven't used it to back up.

I'm looking for an "off site" solution for backing up my photos. I think what I'll do is simply copy everything to a pair of 1TB USB drives and toss it one of them in a safe deposit box and swap it out once a month or once a quarter or whenever I remember.

Bottom line: Time Machine is not adequate to be your only backup. I suggest 2 or more backup strategies with at least some of your more important data stored off site.

hope this helps...

 

[yeg780]

r0k,

Thanks for the reply - very informative. I also have a time capsule but I don't use time machine. Being a multi-mac family (I should really update my signature to reflect that) I use the time capsule to house our iTunes and iPhoto libraries centrally as my wife only likes to use the iMac and not the mbp.

When I got the time capsule I figured it would be best used as mentioned above and to have a back up on an external drive. Actually, two external drives as the time capsule is holding the original data.

With iTunes and iPhoto we have a combined total of over 50GB of data. Not as much as many on this forum but enough that if something were to happen it would be impossible to get those memories (iPhoto) back and would take forever (iTunes) to download and re-rip everything.

Thanks for sharing your backup,