Need Help Devising a Backup Plan

[quasar720]

I have a Mac Pro that I use for personal photos, home movies, my music collection and schoolwork. I'm trying to devise a plan for making secure backups of this data.

My current plan is to install hard drives in bays 3 and 4 (bay 2 is for a Boot Camp XP install) and make a RAID-1 array with OSX.

I want to setup automatic scheduled backups of my media and documents to this RAID so that I don't have to do it manually. I am a .Mac subscriber so I could use Backup, but I have concerns over the way the data is stored. Has anyone done a restore off of a Backup archive? What I'm worried about is that some of the plans like 'Home Folder backup' or 'iLife backup' seem to combine everything in one file. So if I were to accidentally delete some photos or music, would I have to restore the entire Home Folder or collection of iLife files? Get what I mean? Maybe it would make sense to develop backup plans for each media type: photos, movies, music etc so that I could only restore the necessary type?

I also have a registered copy of SuperDuper! that I could use in roughly the same way. Anyone have a compelling argument for either piece of software?

Maybe I'm making this more complicated than it needs to be, but now that I have to wait until the Fall for Time Machine, I'm trying to devise the easiest and safest plan. Thanks for any input!

 

[varmit]

I have a Mac Pro that I use for personal photos, home movies, my music collection and schoolwork. I'm trying to devise a plan for making secure backups of this data.

My current plan is to install hard drives in bays 3 and 4 (bay 2 is for a Boot Camp XP install) and make a RAID-1 array with OSX.

I want to setup automatic scheduled backups of my media and documents to this RAID so that I don't have to do it manually. I am a .Mac subscriber so I could use Backup, but I have concerns over the way the data is stored. Has anyone done a restore off of a Backup archive? What I'm worried about is that some of the plans like 'Home Folder backup' or 'iLife backup' seem to combine everything in one file. So if I were to accidentally delete some photos or music, would I have to restore the entire Home Folder or collection of iLife files? Get what I mean? Maybe it would make sense to develop backup plans for each media type: photos, movies, music etc so that I could only restore the necessary type?

I also have a registered copy of SuperDuper! that I could use in roughly the same way. Anyone have a compelling argument for either piece of software?

Maybe I'm making this more complicated than it needs to be, but now that I have to wait until the Fall for Time Machine, I'm trying to devise the easiest and safest plan. Thanks for any input!

The Backup tool that apple gives you with .Mac works pretty well. Its really easy to use, and if I remember corretly you can bring back single file at a time. I do remember that after a long time, the backups started to take up more and more room, which is why I stopped using it since my files changes quite a bit. If anything, I would say use rsync to do you backups. rsync will basically copy the files you want it to, but if the file exists it will skip it, or if it changed it will update the file with the new one. That would mean its always the latest, so you wouldn't be able to go back a few revisions of a doc if you wanted. Where the backup that comes with .Mac allows for you to go back in time if I remember correctly to restore and older version of a file, which is why the backups will get larger and larger in time. I would suggest testing a few out and see what meets your needs.

http://www.egg-tech.com/mac_backup/

http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2005/07/22/backup.html

 

[quasar720]

Thanks for the reply. I can see using rsync but I'd really like to keep it simple and just use Backup. This may also be me trying to justify why I bought .Mac in the first place

Since my original post, I purchased the two HDDs and created a RAID array as described. I now have Energy Saver set to wake up my Mac Pro at 7:00am every week and Backup set to run four different backup plans at that time. Sounds great right? Too bad I can't get it to work reliably.

Here's the weird part. If I test it by putting the computer to sleep and having Energy Saver set to wake it in 3-4 minutes and Backup set to run 3-4 minutes after that it works fine. It's only when I leave it for the next day in the same type of configuration that it won't work. Has anyone had a bug where scheduling fails when the computer is asleep for a number of hours? It's a long shot, I know but this is maddening!

 

[gauchogolfer]

You might try using iCal to have the machine run the program on a given schedule. I've done that in the past and it works fine.