I think that I have a very robust backup recovery plan... and last night, I had to perform my first ever "disaster recovery" using off-site cloud backup.
Background:
Family of four with a total of eight Macs. Each of us has a 27" iMac ('09, '10, '11, '12) and a MBA ('10, '11, '12, 13). Each person has an individual Time Capsule to back up their own systems. We also have a Crashplan+ unlimited family plan backing up all of the computers. For my personal machine, I also clone my media using CCC to a set of drives that are rotated off-site -- as I maintain the master copy of all "irreplaceable media", including our entire Aperture library and personal "camcorder" videos. These are all irreplaceable.
Summary:
Disaster Recovery:
For the first time (last night)... I needed to restore from Crashplan+. Yesterday... my daughter dropped her 2010 MBA, totally destroying it... so we purchased a replacement last night. Unknown to me... she had stopped backing up her MBA to her Time Capsule while she was away at grad school; I think her motive for shutting it off was to prevent backups while she was playing WoW. In any case... it was never turned back on and her Time Capsule backup was woefully out of date.
We set up her new MBA last night as a "new machine". Previously, we would always restore from TM when we got new machines. Then I needed to do a few manual things that would have been "mostly" unnecessary if we had the TM backup.
Conclusion:
The entire procedure was a lot easier than I expected, and it was MUCH easier than I feared. One thing that made it easy was that it was her small 128GB MBA, which by definition would be relatively "data lite". Still... it is a great reassurance that everything works as planned, and a full recovery is quite possible... or even "trivial" to perform. In fact, it was so easy to do, that I could have easily restored my machine in a hotel room while traveling anywhere in the world (near an Apple store).
If I ever needed to do this on my iMac (1.5 TB of Crashplan+ backup data)... then I would spend the $125 to have them Fed-Ex me an encrypted backup-set to do a local restore. The fact that this option exists is by itself quite valuable.
Bottom line: I am really pleased!!!
/Jim
Background:
Family of four with a total of eight Macs. Each of us has a 27" iMac ('09, '10, '11, '12) and a MBA ('10, '11, '12, 13). Each person has an individual Time Capsule to back up their own systems. We also have a Crashplan+ unlimited family plan backing up all of the computers. For my personal machine, I also clone my media using CCC to a set of drives that are rotated off-site -- as I maintain the master copy of all "irreplaceable media", including our entire Aperture library and personal "camcorder" videos. These are all irreplaceable.
Summary:
- Time Machine/Time Capsule - Local backup of all machines
- Crashplan+ - Offsite backup of all machines for disaster recovery
- CCC - Cloned backup (2 copies) of all irreplaceable media, rotated off-site
Disaster Recovery:
For the first time (last night)... I needed to restore from Crashplan+. Yesterday... my daughter dropped her 2010 MBA, totally destroying it... so we purchased a replacement last night. Unknown to me... she had stopped backing up her MBA to her Time Capsule while she was away at grad school; I think her motive for shutting it off was to prevent backups while she was playing WoW. In any case... it was never turned back on and her Time Capsule backup was woefully out of date.
We set up her new MBA last night as a "new machine". Previously, we would always restore from TM when we got new machines. Then I needed to do a few manual things that would have been "mostly" unnecessary if we had the TM backup.
- Manually install Drobpox
- Install a few applications (ex: MS Office, iWork, Aperture)
- Start a new TM backup to her TC
- Installed Crashplan+ on her new machine
- Restored all of her personal data from Crashplan
- Set Crashplan to "Inherit her old backup".
Conclusion:
The entire procedure was a lot easier than I expected, and it was MUCH easier than I feared. One thing that made it easy was that it was her small 128GB MBA, which by definition would be relatively "data lite". Still... it is a great reassurance that everything works as planned, and a full recovery is quite possible... or even "trivial" to perform. In fact, it was so easy to do, that I could have easily restored my machine in a hotel room while traveling anywhere in the world (near an Apple store).
If I ever needed to do this on my iMac (1.5 TB of Crashplan+ backup data)... then I would spend the $125 to have them Fed-Ex me an encrypted backup-set to do a local restore. The fact that this option exists is by itself quite valuable.
Bottom line: I am really pleased!!!
/Jim
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