Essentials for Good iMac backup plan?

[jaybar]

Hi

Over the weekend, I lost my time machine backup due to external HD failure (Glyph).

I purchased new G-Tech hard drives. One is a 2TB heavy G-Drive with external power supply. The other is a 1TB G-Drive mobile that is daisy chained via fire wire 800. I am backing up to BOTH drives using ML time machine.

ARE THERE GAPS IN MY BACKUP PLAN?

Do I need a bootable clone? If so is Super Duper recommended?

Do I also need some type of cloud backup? If so, recommendations?

Do I also need a backup of my Tine Machine backups?

Anything else.

Thanks

Jay

 

[simsaladimbamba]

What you could do is have two backups (sometimes three are recommended).

• Backup your iMac via Time Machine to an external HDD and back that external HDD up via CarbonCopyCloner (version 3.4.7 is still free and available for download here and works with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, Mac OS X 10.7 Lion and OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion) or SuperDuper!.
• Backup your iMac via Time Machine to an external HDD and also back it up via CCC or SD! to another external HDD, thus you have one bootable clone and one with different versions.
• Backup your iMac via CCC or SD! to two external HDDs.

 

[zhenya]

I think you need something off-site, and so long as you have a decent Internet connection, it should be cloud-based so it is automated. Manually rotating drives off-site is going to get old eventually.

I really like Crashplan. Dead reliable and very inexpensive.

So long as you have your Time Machine and cloud backups, you don't really need anything else. Bootable clones will speed up recovery time should that need arise, but are not really necessary.

 

[jaybar]

For on-line backups, do I need to back up my whole iMac, which could take a long time the first time or do I just back up essential files online ?

Thanks

Jay

 

[simsaladimbamba]

For on-line backups, do I need to back up my whole iMac, which could take a long time the first time or do I just back up essential files online ?

Thanks

Jay

That is up to you. Dropbox offers 2 GB for free, which can be upped to 5GB via an Android or iOS device and its included camera.
I use Dropbox for some text files and such, which then can be accessed from anywhere.
A complete backup of your iMac might take days depending on your upload speed and the amount of data, and restoring will take another couple of hours.
An external HDD, either a cloned one (still the fastest way to recover) or a Time Machine HDD, is still faster to backup to than something in the cloud, unless you have the privilege of 10 MB/s + upload speeds.

 

[tyche]

Using cloud based backup is useful as a second layer of protection. Something like Crashplan is designed to backup your data directories and not a full os. It even has fancy features like backup to a friends computer and vice versa.

 

[whodatrr]

Ditto... fire, theft, floods, etc. Nowadays, my digital content is as or more irreplaceable as any inanimate objects I have lying around. Buy a big drive to keep at a friend's house, while offering to do the same for him/her. Done.

I think you need something off-site, and so long as you have a decent Internet connection, it should be cloud-based so it is automated. Manually rotating drives off-site is going to get old eventually.

I really like Crashplan. Dead reliable and very inexpensive.

So long as you have your Time Machine and cloud backups, you don't really need anything else. Bootable clones will speed up recovery time should that need arise, but are not really necessary.