Backup strategy?

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.

 

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).

 

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.)

 

Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it

 

Ya, but then I'd be "File-sharing", and RIAA might hunt me down....

 

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.

 

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!