Thoughts on my backup strategy?

[ToothTooth]

I'm a new Mac user and here's what I'm planning for my backup strategy:

1.) I have a 500GB internal HDD in my 2011 mac mini which holds all my important stuff (iTunes library, personal photos/movies, tax documents, etc.).

2.) I plan to use FW800 to attach a dual HDD external enclosure with total storage of 2TB (1TB + 1TB). This external drive will be the destination for Time Machine backups.

3.) On a weekly or monthly basis, I plan to connect a separate 1TB external HDD and use Carbon Copy Cloner to create a clone of the mac mini's 500GB HDD. The cloned HDD will be kept offsite.

Any suggestions to improve this backup strategy? Would there be any good reason to set up the dual HDD enclosure (the Time Machine backup destination) in RAID 1 (mirroring)?

Thanks.

 

[r0k]

I'm a new Mac user and here's what I'm planning for my backup strategy:

1.) I have a 500GB internal HDD in my 2011 mac mini which holds all my important stuff (iTunes library, personal photos/movies, tax documents, etc.).

2.) I plan to use FW800 to attach a dual HDD external enclosure with total storage of 2TB (1TB + 1TB). This external drive will be the destination for Time Machine backups.

3.) On a weekly or monthly basis, I plan to connect a separate 1TB external HDD and use Carbon Copy Cloner to create a clone of the mac mini's 500GB HDD. The cloned HDD will be kept offsite.

Any suggestions to improve this backup strategy? Would there be any good reason to set up the dual HDD enclosure (the Time Machine backup destination) in RAID 1 (mirroring)?

Thanks.

You can use CCC to clone the internal drive to one of the FW800 internal drives. In fact, you can use the same drive you are using for Time Machine if you decide to set up the 2 1TB drives as mirrors. I strongly suggest you avoid thinking of Time Machine as a backup strategy and focus on it more as a convenience with CCC or Crashplan as your backup strategy.

So here is my modification of your strategy:

1 - Time Machine backup to external FW800 drive set up either as a separate 1TB or as 2TB + 2TB mirror.

2 - CCC backup to the FW 800 drive OR crashplan (free) to the FW800 drive or both. (you can't have too many backups!)

3 - Once a week or so, connect a separate 1TB external HDD and copy the CCC image from the FW800 drive you normally use to the separate 1TB drive and toss in a safe spot.

4 - As an alternative to #3, if you can afford it, give backup to crashplan (paid) server a try. It might blow your upload bandwidth during initial seeding but I have successfully used crashplan's server to recover from a wiped Macintosh HDD with a corrupted Time Capsule Time Machine backup.

hope this helps...