Computer data backup

Hannah, being a long time Mac user, I have a few back up strategies that I use.

First is I occasionally burn my data to a CD and keep it in a seperate location from the computer. Safety deposit boxes are good for this!

Lately, I've started to use this cool little USB flash memory devices. Actually, I like these better than CD's, as you can reuse them.

Finally, I just started using a beta service on the web called mozy http://mozy.com they just began beta testing their mac service. I've been using them to back up, but have not yet tried testing a re-install. I think, since you bring up the back up issue. I will try a restore so I know if they are actually a solution or not.

In my opinion it is best to have a couple of backup schemes that you use regularly. Just in case one of them fails.

Hope that helps Michael

I am back! But, have a commitment tonight, so I will have to attend the next opening.

Swing by tea next week, and we can talk thumb drives, mac backup, and life in general.

MM

Michael is right: It's best to have TWO backups in case one of them fails. One option for one of those backups is an external hard drive that you back up to every other day or once a week, depending on how much new data you generate. That would be on-site, so if you are worried about things other than computer crashes (like a fire, theft, etc.) then you might want to have an offsite location or fine another service. From what I understand, .mac is pretty good and for the peace of mind, it's not really expensive.

The nice thing about a service like .mac is that you don't have to think about backing things up. If you use a non-service-related backup, you'll need to give yourself some kind of weekly or daily reminder to backup or attach your backup routine to another routine.

I know there are other services out there but I think most of them are not offered for mac. Maybe some of our techie bizniks can go more in-depth on this.

I hope that's helpful. You are smart to be thinking of a backup system as I have seen the utter stress it causes a business owner to lose data. It's always good to anticipate this stuff instead of finding out later what you could have done.

So far some good suggestions, here's my two cents on why backup fails:

1) Backups fail because they don't get run. Automated systems help here 2) Backups fail because they get misconfigured. Full drive imaging or software that helps you pick the right items to backup are great. 3) Backups fail because of bad media. Avoid tapes, be weary of CD for long term storage.

Mozy is pretty good on the PC, haven't tried the Mac Beta. I've been digging Jungle Disk with S3, but its a bit more complex to setup. Either way you have to consider the quantity of data vs. the upload speed of your internet connection. http://www.jungledisk.com/

I'm not a fan of thumbdrive backups, but its an okay second option. I recommend iBackup software to help actually back up the data. http://www.grapefruit.ch/iBackup/

Mirra is a nice networked backup for many machines, but are only practical with large quantities of data and/or many machines. http://www.selkowitz.com/dept.asp?dept_id=06

Wonder why to backup? We see 2-5 failed drives each month, one or two is unreadable by the time they're brought to us. Clean room data recovery is often in the $2k ballpark. Hard choice between $2k or losing everything on your computer.

I think an indie business needs such preventions, Hannah. I could see there are good suggestions for your post. So, let me add some extra notes:

• Preparing backups on CDs (depend on their quality) may be restorable from 2 up to 7 years. Also, increasing the write speed may cause decreasing your backup?s lifetime. DVDs are better in lifetime but still facing problems with write speed.
• Are you familiar with FTP (File Transfer Protocol)? I could see that you have a web site. If your Web Service Provider is a trustable one, so you may simply create a folder in your web site host space and use this space as an online backup solution.
• I?m with Michael in having two (or more) backups distributed somewhere else.
• Flash memories are good for Data Traveling not Data Backup!
• I would like to hear about a Portable HDD solution. Anti-shock, Fire resistant (and water resistant) are some of their bold specifications.
• Never and never and never make your backups on your primary partition (that most of the time is called as Drive C). Drive C is the most delicious part of you HDD for a virus infection tragedy ;-) and really hard to restore.
• I know someone attach their backup files to e-mail and send back them to them selves! In this case, they never use free web-mails such as Yahoo.

And finally, when you are using an online backup system, make sure that your uploaded files are working properly in a restore flow. If there are many files to check, do it randomly and pay more attention to the large files (in size). This is because; when you are transferring computer files over the Internet (by unexpected reasons) some of your data packets may lose. Well, still you think a .mac service doesn?t worth it? I hope you find it useful.

Good points about having some kind of software to automate the backup process. Recently, I have been using Chronosynch. http://www.econtechnologies.com/site/Pages/ChronoSync/chrono_overview.html I like it because it both can synchonize my office iMac with my personal iBook, and because it is a great application that makes it easy to back up those "must have" files.

I just tried doing a restore from Mozy of my backed up data. While it does restore files quite nicely. Not all the files I thought it was backing up were in the archive. Well, it is still beta after all. I will be letting them know about this. For now, perhaps the .mac is a worthwhile way to go with offsite backups.

Hannah,

One of my favorite ways to "back up" data is to arrange my data storage, such that I never have to back anything up. This method is not applicable in all cases, but I am suprised to find that it works out for about 90% of my data needs. For most of my data (addresses, documents) I store them on gmail under labels and storage based Gmail account names. I figure, Google is well positioned to reliabley deal with my backup needs :) At the same time, I have a local copy of most documents, should I need off-line access to them.

This doesn't work as effectively for things like music and video yet but I figure that's only a matter of time. I also store my photos on a photo service, again, for me, for the sake of only having to manage a single sign-on, etc it's Google Picasaweb, but a lot of people like Flikr better.

-Cere

I wouldn't leave important data to a free service. Even Google has lost data:

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061230-8524.html http://digg.com/software/Google_Home_page_gets_less_personal

I've known plenty of people's who's free accounts at yahoo, google, and hotmail have been shut down, hacked, etc.

Free services are fine for a second copy (after all how likely is it for your machine to crash and google to lose data) but I wouldn't have my only copy in the hands of a free service.

I'm a Mac user and I don't know how PCs run, but since Hannah's original question was about her Mac, I thought I'd pipe in.

I'm also not much of a techie (I'm just married to one) so I can't speak with too much authority except to say that there's something with the Mac OS that makes some of your most important files for running applications and things are "hidden" and therefore do not get copied when you backup by simply dragging and dropping a "copy" of a folder onto a CD, thumbdrive or external drive.

These files are not copied even when you drag a copyof the Hard Drive and drop it onto an external drive.

So what Dan's got us doing is using a cloning application, that makes a CLONE of the Hard Drive. That way if anything happens, we can restore the entire clone back onto our laptop or a new machine, and it's boot-able and everything.

The one I use is called Deja Vu. When I googled it, I found this link.

I've also used SuperDuper! with success.

How could I forget, though you don't want to wait a few months to start backing up, Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard" (coming this fall) has an incredible new backup system called Time Machine:

http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/timemachine.html

From what we know its an automated incremental backup system which is actually easy to use.

I also have a theory about it. Time machine is intended to be connected to an external hard drive for backups. However one of the new Airport Extreme features is shared hard drives:

http://www.apple.com/airportextreme/sharing.html

I'm hoping we'll see that you can wirelessly back up to the shared Airport hard drive - eliminating the need to plug in a drive to backup. (assuming of course your MacBook is an 802.11n model so the wifi connection will be fast enough)

On an unrelated Leopard note, one other feature I'm excited about is iChat's Screen Sharing - great for collaboration, support, etc.

Awesome, Kevin. Thanks for the head's up.

re: does this apply to photos, music, videos? Yes. Digital media is digital media.

Of course photos, music and videos are large files, so if you'll need larger external drives for those kinds of files.

For example, in addition to a 120gb external drive that I clone my laptop onto once a week, I also have an 80gb external drive for snapshots, a 80gb for music, a 200gb for my professional photos, and a 30gb for legal documents & financial records. I keep the little 30gb drive in a fireproof safe in a closet.

When thinking about back-up, it's important to consider the variety of kinds of data, the variety of ways that data can get lost, the assorted ways that we store data, and the variety of circumstances under which we might be operating come time to restore data.

I've had data "lost" by way of hardware failure, by way of catastrophe (fire AND flood), and by way of theft. Probably, I've also left data behind somewhere, forgetfully.

I've been temporarily disconnected from my data or data back-up, through VPN and server glitches, and Internet down times (severed phone lines, power failures, too many packets in the line).

None of this is to frighten or discourage, but just to prod--that we ought look at our operations from a variety of angles before believing our back-up routine is sufficient. :-)

There are a lot of good suggestions here. (Listen to Kevin, he knows whereof he speaks :). But I thought I'd throw a little additional info out. First is another free program for the Mac that I use personally. It's called SilverKeeper, made by the well known Mac storage company LaCie. It's intended for use with their storage products of course but it works with anything and is freely downloadable from their site: http://www.silverkeeper.com/ Regarding backups in general, whatever media you use, whatever system you use, whatever software you use, there are several things that need to be considered: - how much data can you afford to lose? This will determine how often the backup needs to be performed. - how much data do you need to backup and how much of it changes on a regular basis? This will determine what mode of backup you use and how often you do a full backup vs incremental. - how far back in time do you need to be able to go? This will also play a role in determining the mode of backup (and is one reason most companies do still use tape). A couple of things to take into account here include how long it might be before you discover a data loss (e.g. quarterly reports) and what the nature of that loss might be (e.g. having a virus might mean that you need to go back several months to find an uninfected set of data). - what are your options for storage of media? I.e. if the place burns down or everything is stolen, where are the backups located and how is it protected? E.g. making daily backups but only putting monthly snapshots in a bank safety deposit box could actually expose you to a worst case loss of up to an entire month. (It's a good idea to keep the most recent backup in some way offsite but easily accessible, such as by sending it home with a trusted employee or even keeping it on your person).

And a couple of tips: Regarding fire-proof safes, if you use one for onsite storage of media keep in mind that A - no safe is truly fireproof, and B - if it's not rated for media you'll have a pool of melted plastic in the bottom! And be sure to test your backup/restore strategy regularly! Backups are useless if the data cannot be restored from them and there are a great many possible causes for bad backups. The time you really need it is not the time to discover it wasn't working properly...

lots of good information here, just throwing in two cents worth.

• you want something designed specifically for MAC
• more than one layer of recovery is definately preferable
• backups for the small business owner needs to be "smoke and rubble", not just data recovery.

with the above in mind, i'd recommend buying TWO of these, and swapping them out weekly to an off-site secure location.

http://www.maxtorsolutions.com/en/catalog/OTIII_Turbo/

tried and tested... my personal (if that matters) recommendation

I just skimmed through these messages, but I know Carbonite (carbonite.com) is a great off-site backup/storage program/company. Just identify the files and folders you want to save on your computer and it will save these whenever you update a file. The rumor is this is the simplest program for restoring lost data due to a hard drive crash, etc. I believe an annual subscription runs for about $50.

Also, Symantec's Norton 360 provides a similar backup service with additional security perks for approximately the same price.

-Cheers

I also use Carbonite as a back up. No particular complaints other than it takes a REALLY long time to back up all your files, like about a week.....But once it's done it's a breeze. But in the interest of full disclosure I haven't had to test it after a catastrophic system failure either(knock on wood). BjR

I use external 500GB and 1TB USB hard drives, and rotate them so I can keep a set off site.

I agree with the need for a 2nd backup, and I'm now also using www.backblaze.com.

$5.00/month for unlimited storage. Works for PC's and Mac's.

Phill Briscoe wrote an excellent article on data backup. It's directed more to windows users but the principles are absolutely spot on.

http://biznik.com/articles/every-business-needs-a-backup-and-disaster-recovery-plan