Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Status
Not open for further replies.
I bet I've invested 1,000+ HOURS maintaining my iTunes library over the years -- ripping songs, downloading from iTunes (on dial-up!), finding cover art, sorting and organizing. Screw the $0.99 cost of the songs, my time alone is worth $30/hr!

I think this is one of the major reasons why I still buy CD's and only buy the odd track from iTunes. There's something comforting about having the physical media, both from a pride-of-ownership point of view and a backup medium.
 
Bad idea.

First of all, if you should ever need that backup, you would have to know where's the useful data that you want to restore. Now think about this for a second: is it easier to find the right stuff at the moment you back it up or after weeks/months/years of storing it somewhere? It's a no-brainer, so only backup useful stuff — then you can really use your backup archive when you need to.

Second, not many of us have unlimited backup storage. If you need to back up -say- half a terabyte every month, you will need 3TB storage for half year's backups. Granted, not many of us want to keep that many backups, but still, you get the picture. If you backup 100%, then you need 100% extra storage for one backup. If you backup 25%, then 50% extra storage is enough for two backups. This is more like a theoretical point, but still very valid. Storage space is not that expensive, but how much is too much?

Lastly, mark my words: "you will need backup archive some day". The day will come, even if everything has been reliable so far. And when that day comes, you need to have a *usable* backup that is also up-to-date. If you only have a year-old DVD that has been scratched to be unusable, can you really call it a backup? No, it's only useless piece of plastic. Or if your backup is scattered to multiple locations and you won't find what you're looking for, then is your data safe? No. Unless you manage to restore lost data, your backup is worthless.

There's also an old saying worth mentioning: "nothing is backed up until it's backed up twice". Trust that. And if you also want to make your life easier for the moment the disaster strikes, please do yourself a favor and *think* ahead about what you're backing up. To repeat myself; think about what data you absolutely want to be able to restore!

The only things I back up (and is quite easy to do) are:

- iTunes folder (has all m4ps, mp3s, m4vs, playlists, etc. in one master folder)
- iPhoto folder (same idea but with photos)
- Documents folder (self-explanatory)
- Address Book

Even then, most of the stuff is "backed up"/duplicated elsewhere like my iPod, iPhone, .Mac, Mac mini, etc. My e-mail is .Mac so it's always on the server (IMAP).

Yeah I only have 1x500 GB external HDD and that's plenty for now (my total back-ups are around 150GBs). I should setup an auto-scheduled backup for every Friday evening or something but for now I just backup whenever I format or something...
 
Bad idea...
First of all, if you should ever need that backup, you would have to know where's the useful data that you want to restore....

Have you ever used SuperDuper! or Carbon Copy? They make an exact copy of your MacBook HD on the external hard drive. So your data is right where it is on the hard drive on your Mac, just go find it.

Sure, you can do a partial back up, but if you do the entire drive, then you can boot from the external drive if you MacBook drive goes bad. Or you can boot another Mac using the data from your MacBook. The only down side is it takes time to do the back up, 1 1/2 hour for a 60 gig HD. That's if you use the FREE version of SuperDuper!. The paid version will let you back up only files that have changed since the last back up and takes much less time.

If you back up regularly then old data isn't an issue. So don't back up, live life on the edge, that will be fun.
 
The iTunes Store gives you one chance to re-download all of your purchases.

The trouble is, content changes on the store, different versions of the songs become available, and track names change. There is a good chance you won't get a small(er) percentage of your purchases back because of this.
 
Have you ever used SuperDuper! or Carbon Copy? They make an exact copy of your MacBook HD on the external hard drive. So your data is right where it is on the hard drive on your Mac, just go find it.

Yes, and that's exactly the problem! Not necessarily if you need the backup after few weeks or even moths, but have you ever tried to restore data from a backup that's very old? Say, for example, you have a three year old backup. Do you remember what went where? I bet you don't. It's a nightmare should you ever have to rely on something that old if it's messed up.

It's a far better solution to only back up what's needed and store the files logically. In such a way anybody could find anything you ask them to restore, even if it wasn't you who performed the data recovery. For example, hierarchy of /Volumes/Backup hard drive could be:

/Mail/...
/AddressCalendar/...
/Pictures/...
/Music/...
/Movies/...
/Documents/...
/Personal/...
/Projects/...

or

/2007-July/...
/2007-June/...
/2007-May/...
/2007-April/...
/2007-March/...

The point being that you should be able to find the useful data whenever you need to restore it. You might need the backup drive after several years of storing the data somewhere, and when you do need it, you'd better have the data organized in such a way that you actually find what you're looking for.

Trust me, this is a lesson I learnt a long time ago. I cannot recommend backing up the whole drive. Cloning in my opinion should be used like when you need to test some unsupported software version...
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.