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Backup strategy?

P

PieMac

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Oct 3, 2002
769
29
After a ton of deliberation and research, I just ordered the 250GB LaCie d2 hard drive extreme. The plan is to use it to backup my home folder on a weekly basis (or perhaps use a utility such as Super Duper and clone my entire PB drive) and to eventually house the overflow of my constantly growing iPhoto library and then there's also my music and, to a lesser degree, movies (I don't use my camcorder all that much-mostly my Canon Rebel XT).

I have a 1.67 Ghz 15" Powerbook with an 80 GB drive so use of the LaCie as external storage is imminent. And then I realize that all I am doing is backing up from one hard drive to another. As we all know, hard drives can fail at any time. So I am pondering what the best backup strategy is as a whole to cover everything. Eventually the external drive will need a backup as well and what to do then? I assume most people purchase another external drive as a second backup and daisy chain them together. DVD's are always an option, but once you have 25,000 photos or so, not very practical.

Advice? And just curious-what's your backup strategy?
 
PieMac said:
After a ton of deliberation and research, I just ordered the 250GB LaCie d2 hard drive extreme. The plan is to use it to backup my home folder on a weekly basis (or perhaps use a utility such as Super Duper and clone my entire PB drive) and to eventually house the overflow of my constantly growing iPhoto library and then there's also my music and, to a lesser degree, movies (I don't use my camcorder all that much-mostly my Canon Rebel XT).

I have a 1.67 Ghz 15" Powerbook with an 80 GB drive so use of the LaCie as external storage is imminent. And then I realize that all I am doing is backing up from one hard drive to another. As we all know, hard drives can fail at any time. So I am pondering what the best backup strategy is as a whole to cover everything. Eventually the external drive will need a backup as well and what to do then? I assume most people purchase another external drive as a second backup and daisy chain them together. DVD's are always an option, but once you have 25,000 photos or so, not very practical.

Advice? And just curious-what's your backup strategy?
Click to expand...

I have a 250 GB external for my home folder and two iPods for backup of my music and pics. I have a 2G 20GB and and a 4G 60GB. Seems to work pretty well so far.
 
I bought a 250 gig or so external drive and a copy of Retrospect. Every night at 2 am Retrospect backs up the Home folders of all three of my Macs to the external drive. I do an incremental backup, which does a full backup the first time and only changed or new files each subsequent. I don't mind that this causes the backup file on the external drive to grow ever larger. This way, I can restore to any interim backup state for any file or files I wish. When the backup file gets too large, I toss it and start again with a new full backup (every two or three months).

Admittedly, backing up to an external drive is less safe than to a more permanent removable media, but because I don't archive to the backup (I archive to CD or DVD those projects I want to retain indefinitely), the external drive is just for disaster recovery in my primary drive fails.

It's especially appealing because once I set it up, it's automatic. It even warns my remote macs if for some reason they've not been backed up in "x" days (I choose the value of "x."

I've used Retrospect for nearly 10 years and it's never let me down. I love it.
 
Moof1904 said:
I bought a 250 gig or so external drive and a copy of Retrospect. Every night at 2 am Retrospect backs up the Home folders of all three of my Macs to the external drive. I do an incremental backup, which does a full backup the first time and only changed or new files each subsequent. I don't mind that this causes the backup file on the external drive to grow ever larger. This way, I can restore to any interim backup state for any file or files I wish. When the backup file gets too large, I toss it and start again with a new full backup (every two or three months).

Admittedly, backing up to an external drive is less safe than to a more permanent removable media, but because I don't archive to the backup (I archive to CD or DVD those projects I want to retain indefinitely), the external drive is just for disaster recovery in my primary drive fails.

It's especially appealing because once I set it up, it's automatic. It even warns my remote macs if for some reason they've not been backed up in "x" days (I choose the value of "x."

I've used Retrospect for nearly 10 years and it's never let me down. I love it.
Click to expand...

How do you configure it to backup all three Macs? Can this be done through Network settings? It would be great to also be able to back up my other half's iMac and 12" powerbook. The LaCie will be wired to my Powerbook through the FW 800 port and all the other Macs are on a network via Airport. Not sure how all of this works as I've never owned an external hard drive before.
 
cloned my pb harddisk to my external with superduper.

update that clone every 1-2 weeks with superdupers smart updates.

burned my photo library and itunes library to dvd's.
burn new pics every 2-3 month manually to dvd.
burn my documents every 2 month to dvd.

no way that both my pb hd and my external hd die at the same day without me having a chance to burn the surviving hd data to dvd.

it would need a meteorite to wipe out all my backups at the same time.
 
Clone PB HD and all other "live" data to two 250 GB Lacie disks - store one off-site at my office.

Back everything up on DVDs - two sets - one set at my house one off site at my dad's house.
 
I keep my music, movies, and photos on a file server with a RAID 1 array. My home folder is copied on all my Macs. About once every 6 months, I back up everything to tape, and ship it to my mom's house (she's got a safe).
 
PieMac said:
How do you configure it to backup all three Macs? Can this be done through Network settings? It would be great to also be able to back up my other half's iMac and 12" powerbook. The LaCie will be wired to my Powerbook through the FW 800 port and all the other Macs are on a network via Airport. Not sure how all of this works as I've never owned an external hard drive before.
Click to expand...

The $99 Retrospect comes with three (I think it's three) client licenses. Just install Retrospect on one mac, the client on the remote machines, add them to the backup script, and go. You're in business. It works effortlessly across the network. (If you have the firewall activated on the client machines, you'll need to open the Retrospect port on the firewall.)
 
Alright I am in some brain fry. I am working a new job and different career, playing dad, and building out my basement, WHILE trying to figure out a good basic, brainless backup strategy.

HELP.

I have a registered copy of SuperDuper and a G-Tech mini firewire powered 100gb wonder box hooked on to my 12" 1.33 mhz PowerBook.

I have read enough to do a brain fry and am admittedly not an IT guy. I am thinking I would like to do a Back Up all user files, and then smart backups from there. I am hoping this will give me a bootable backup to have and to hold till death we do part.

Is this correct? and how do I get the pesky applescript to work to do a daily backup? (ya reading the directions in the pdf to no avail!!)
 
Here's what I'm doing for a OS X-compatible NAS type solution... buy an older powermac on ebay, install a raid card and a couple drives for a raid 1 share, install a gigabit NIC, OS X tiger, and walla! Don't have to worry about NTFS filename restrictions, special characters, samba crap, resource forks getting lost, etc.
 
MacVault said:
Here's what I'm doing for a OS X-compatible NAS type solution... buy an older powermac on ebay, install a raid card and a couple drives for a raid 1 share, install a gigabit NIC, OS X tiger, and walla! Don't have to worry about NTFS filename restrictions, special characters, samba crap, resource forks getting lost, etc.
Click to expand...

Pretty much what I do. I have my Mac mini on the desk, powermac below the desk, and back up to teh powermac from the mini an important info, then burn it to DVD every few months.

It's nice because, the superdrive in my mini is WAY faster than my old PM, but you can take the netwokred files, throw them into a burn folder on the mini and burn on the fly, right there, no B.S, no hassle, and faster than what I'm used to. (6 minutes per DVD as opposed to 30.)

After I burn everything to DVD I trash it off the powermac's HD's. Plus, I use the powermac a streaming media server through wireless lan. woot!
 
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