Backups
I was listening to Mac Tech the other day, one
of the many, many podcasts I subscribe to and I
came across their episode about backups.
<sigh>, I know, backups. Everyone needs these and every body says that every one needs them. And normally the only people that have a system for this are the people that have lost data through some sort of disk failure or deletion ‘user failure’ etc.
I say normally, because I am one of those people. Years ago, back in my PC days, I lost everything through a Windows reinstall format ‘user failure’. Yes I messed up and formated the wrong disk and lost everything. Which is why I don’t have my first version of this site or any of my very first stories. It’s very sad!
Anyway, despite that I didn’t until recently have any real sort of back up system in place.
I would from time to time copy my Documents directory to my USB pen drive, but that was it.
So after hearing this maybe alarmist podcast, I decided that it was time to do something about it.
I say alarmist, but these guys do use lots of disks and so they are in a position to know about the life times of hard drives and using them in business they need rock solid backups.
Hard drives don’t last forever, it doesn’t matter if they are running or not, bearings were out or freeze up. When, not if, they die, the chances are that your data will die a long with it. So tape backup? Nope those don’t last forever either, apparently the metal oxides rust and data can be lost that way. Not that tape backup would really work for me, or at least it would be if I could afford it!
I guess all of this goes back to what I was saying in my ‘life after people’ post, unless something is ‘alive’ and changing (in this case the data isn’t changing but the location of the bits of the data is) entropy takes it’s toll and things start to decay.
Okay now this post is getting off subject and depressing! Back to backups.
So my current strategy is a daily SuperDuper task makes a complete copy (a clone) of my hard drive every night at 02:00 to another internal drive. I did want to go for a RAID 1 set up which is built in to OSX (10.5 and I think 10.4), but in order to do that I would need to start again with a fresh install. Having done this set up I now think that cloning the drive is a better option any way. Do it this way, if I delete a file and then go and empty the bin (it happens with me...a lot!) and I find out I want that file before the next day I can get the file back. It’s a sort of very limited Time Machine set up.
That protects me from drive failure, so now I need to cover my self from disasters, like say my flat burning down! To cover that angle I have an external hard drive, a Western Digital my book, which I do a monthly back on to. This drive then for the rest of the month lives at my draw in work. The chances of both buildings burning down in the same day is slim (for the same reason, I have the off site backup for work at home!) This external drive again has a fully bootable clone of my disk on it, made by SuperDuper.
This drive is *not* the firewire version, which I couldn’t afford, so how do I boot from it (for those not in the know macs can only boot from external firewire drives, not USB ones). Well I was worried about this too, then a friend pointed out that I have a macbook as well. One of the really clever things about all apple laptops is that by holding down the T key while powering up, turns your at least £600 laptop in to a simple £100 firewire drive. And it is a really dumb drive, you get no power management, you just get a drive. So I could boot from the laptops drive as a firewire drive and then plug in either to my macpro or macbook the USB drive and use SuperDuper to do the restore.
So thats disaster recovery covered. The final thing is to have another copy of the data I can get to just in case. So I have zipped copies of my Documents and important Library directories on a remote server. For this I use Amazon S3 service and Transmit as my client. However I have one small problem here, these directories even when zipped come to over a gig and half in size. Not a problem for Amazon, but uploading this takes about 12 hours. I can’t leave my machine on for that long, well I could, but I don’t want too. So I upload the whole thing once a month manually and every day I just upload the stuff than has changed.
Well thats the theory anyway, I’ve not quite got the applescript/automator code together yet to get this bit working...yet.
So thats it my backup strategy.
<sigh>, I know, backups. Everyone needs these and every body says that every one needs them. And normally the only people that have a system for this are the people that have lost data through some sort of disk failure or deletion ‘user failure’ etc.
I say normally, because I am one of those people. Years ago, back in my PC days, I lost everything through a Windows reinstall format ‘user failure’. Yes I messed up and formated the wrong disk and lost everything. Which is why I don’t have my first version of this site or any of my very first stories. It’s very sad!
Anyway, despite that I didn’t until recently have any real sort of back up system in place.
I would from time to time copy my Documents directory to my USB pen drive, but that was it.
So after hearing this maybe alarmist podcast, I decided that it was time to do something about it.
I say alarmist, but these guys do use lots of disks and so they are in a position to know about the life times of hard drives and using them in business they need rock solid backups.
Hard drives don’t last forever, it doesn’t matter if they are running or not, bearings were out or freeze up. When, not if, they die, the chances are that your data will die a long with it. So tape backup? Nope those don’t last forever either, apparently the metal oxides rust and data can be lost that way. Not that tape backup would really work for me, or at least it would be if I could afford it!
I guess all of this goes back to what I was saying in my ‘life after people’ post, unless something is ‘alive’ and changing (in this case the data isn’t changing but the location of the bits of the data is) entropy takes it’s toll and things start to decay.
Okay now this post is getting off subject and depressing! Back to backups.
So my current strategy is a daily SuperDuper task makes a complete copy (a clone) of my hard drive every night at 02:00 to another internal drive. I did want to go for a RAID 1 set up which is built in to OSX (10.5 and I think 10.4), but in order to do that I would need to start again with a fresh install. Having done this set up I now think that cloning the drive is a better option any way. Do it this way, if I delete a file and then go and empty the bin (it happens with me...a lot!) and I find out I want that file before the next day I can get the file back. It’s a sort of very limited Time Machine set up.
That protects me from drive failure, so now I need to cover my self from disasters, like say my flat burning down! To cover that angle I have an external hard drive, a Western Digital my book, which I do a monthly back on to. This drive then for the rest of the month lives at my draw in work. The chances of both buildings burning down in the same day is slim (for the same reason, I have the off site backup for work at home!) This external drive again has a fully bootable clone of my disk on it, made by SuperDuper.
This drive is *not* the firewire version, which I couldn’t afford, so how do I boot from it (for those not in the know macs can only boot from external firewire drives, not USB ones). Well I was worried about this too, then a friend pointed out that I have a macbook as well. One of the really clever things about all apple laptops is that by holding down the T key while powering up, turns your at least £600 laptop in to a simple £100 firewire drive. And it is a really dumb drive, you get no power management, you just get a drive. So I could boot from the laptops drive as a firewire drive and then plug in either to my macpro or macbook the USB drive and use SuperDuper to do the restore.
So thats disaster recovery covered. The final thing is to have another copy of the data I can get to just in case. So I have zipped copies of my Documents and important Library directories on a remote server. For this I use Amazon S3 service and Transmit as my client. However I have one small problem here, these directories even when zipped come to over a gig and half in size. Not a problem for Amazon, but uploading this takes about 12 hours. I can’t leave my machine on for that long, well I could, but I don’t want too. So I upload the whole thing once a month manually and every day I just upload the stuff than has changed.
Well thats the theory anyway, I’ve not quite got the applescript/automator code together yet to get this bit working...yet.
So thats it my backup strategy.
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