My Backup Strategy
On a few recent Mac Geek Gab episodes I’ve mentioned my current backup strategy and more than a few listeners have asked me to document this somewhere. I figured this blog was as good a place as any.
Starting in 1995 and up until February when Apple’s Time Capsule came out, I was a died-in-the-wool Retrospect user. But I got sick. and. tired. of. waiting. for. an. update. Even still there’s no Intel native version of Retrospect (due Real Soon Now… in October, or maybe later), and to me that means it’s not currently a viable option anymore. Combine that with Mac OS X Leopard’s Time Machine and Time Capsule and, well, life can be better than Retrospect.
And it is.
Time Capsule/Time Machine
I have 5 Macs to back-up. 4 of them are on Leopard, and one is on Tiger (too old to run Leopard). All 4 Leopard machines back up to a 1TB Time Capsule. The TC sits over at the house, and is connected via Gigabit Ethernet buried underground. This means if the office burns down the Time Capsule likely won’t go with it, and vice versa regarding the house. Semi-off-site I like to call it. So that’s one line of defense.
SuperDuper
I also use SuperDuper daily to clone my MacBook Pro’s hard drive to an external FireWire drive sitting here in my office. This provides both a second backup as well as an “instant boot” method if my main drive were to go down at any point.
Additionally, I use SuperDuper on the Tiger machine to back up critical files daily to the Time Capsule. Yes, though Tiger can’t run Time Machine, it can very much see the Time Capsule as a shared drive, and this works perfectly.
IMAP
Because I use IMAP for my mail, my “current” email is stored on the three Macs I use regularly (MacBook Pro in office, iMac in studio, Dual G4 over at house), so that’s backed up. Because of this, I exclude the mail directories from Time Machine backups on all but my MacBook Pro (those being [home]/Library/Mail/IMAP-[name of mailbox]). No need to back that data up again onto the same Time Capsule drive.
iDisk
Earlier this year, I decided to fully adopt the “cloud computing” concept and moved all of my documents up to my iDisk. This doesn’t include pictures or music, but pretty much everything else is there. It takes up about 3 GB. The beauty is that the iDisk can be synced for offline usage to any (or all) of my Macs. So again I have it synced to the 3 Macs I use most, and again I exclude it from Time Machine on all but one of them (this is done by excluding [home]/Library/FileSync, for those playing along at home).
MobileMe Sync
Since I use multiple computers as well as an iPhone, I take full advantage of MobileMe’s ability to sync Contacts, Calendars, and Bookmarks. And while I don’t fully consider this a backup necessarily, it certainly acts as one since the data exists on all 3 computer plus the MobileMe cloud.
So I have all of my data in at least two places, and some of it in as many as 6. Yes it seems a little obsessive when you break it down, but it really all flows very smoothly together with the sole exception of MobileMe Sync, which is not entirely reliable and requires massaging and resetting about once every six weeks. The rest of it has worked like a charm since I started down this path in February, and I have no intention of changing any time soon.
If you have any questions, please just feel free to comment and ask.
July 22nd, 2008 at 3:54 pm
Thanks for the run down, Dave. I love SuperDuper! though I have to admit that I have so much faith in my Western Digital drives that I only use Time Machine to a portable drive now.
As an aside, it would almost be worth thinking about using OS X server so you can use a mobile home account across those machines, and backup to a cheaper Drobo or RAID system. Just a thought.
July 22nd, 2008 at 3:57 pm
That’s an interesting thought, Matt. I would need to learn more about Mobile Home Directories. I’ve always been concerned with them since I take my Mac on the road, but now with all my docs on an iDisk, maybe it’s not an issue?
July 22nd, 2008 at 4:59 pm
Thanks for the info Dave. I currently only do a “Super Duper” every week and a “Time Machine” twice a day.
I’d give 100 dollars a year if I could get iDisk + Backup to work. Oh wait I do give 100 bucks a year and it still doesn’t. It works for most small files but big ones, forget it. I’ve been trying to get it to backup my iPhoto Library for a year. I had to try again seeing as I got 14 GB free I thought…Today will be the day. But no.
Any ideas on why you cannot backup a large chunk all at once to the service? I got twice as much space available then I need.
Great show today guys! Thanks for the podcast.
July 23rd, 2008 at 9:20 am
.Mac/.Me’s Backup.app is pretty underpowered. I would simply recommend doing a copy to your iDisk from the FInder (or using Transmit or something similar). That may work better for you.
July 24th, 2008 at 4:36 am
Hi Dave,
Great article on the backups. I have one question however, can you maybe explain to me how you synch your iDisk to an offline location? I’ve been looking to do the same thing. Have my documents sit on iDisk with a copy on my local iMac and automatical synching between the two whenever I update something on either the iDisk or the offline version. (Kinda like “offline folders” in Windows XP)
Thanks,
sSslik
July 24th, 2008 at 7:22 am
Hi sSslik –
Syncing your iDisk is done by going to System Preferences->MobileMe (or .Mac)->iDisk and then at the bottom of that pane click “Start” in the “iDisk Sync” section and tell it to update Automatically.
Two things:
#1 — When traveling or on “iffy” connections, don’t Stop iDisk syncing, just change it to “Manually” — This will keep the offline copy on your machine (choosing “Stop” will likely delete it).
#2 — The local copy of the iDisk is stored as a sparse bundle on your Mac in [home]/Library/FileSync. If you *don’t* want Time Machine to back this up, this is the directory to exclude. You can see above in the article how I use this on all but one of my machines to limit the number of backups I have.
July 26th, 2008 at 1:16 pm
Hi Dave regarding the iDisk Documents sync. Do you save all your new doc’s to the Documents folder on the local iDisk OR to the normal home folder documents folder??
Cheers
Matt
July 27th, 2008 at 4:29 am
Thanksssssss for the effort to write about it Dave!
My problem was the disappearance of the iDisk local copy. So…
Great tip about setting iDisk Sync to ‘manual sync’ instead of Stop iDisk.
July 28th, 2008 at 8:05 am
Matt — I save all my new docs to a folder hierarchy I have set up on my iDisk, yes.
August 2nd, 2008 at 3:30 pm
I use CarbonCopyCloner and alternate 2 External Lacie Drives as Backups every other week. PLus the Time Machine which I hook my laptop to once per day. But you can’t beat cutting a data DVD of your various document files every so often to have a nice offsite copy. Do that DVD with Family Photos a few times per year. Take’em to the shore house. VG
August 11th, 2008 at 6:07 am
hey dave,
slightly off topic
my partner has IMAP set up on two computers and has about 3 active email accounts but is perpetually running up against huge walls of mailbox space. IMAP folders of 4gbs don’t seem tosort very well.
how do you handle this.