I’ve been bravely using SuperDuper with Leopard, despite it’s incompatibility. I guess duping my main drive very easy to do with rsync.

I’ve also found that JungleDisk is a very effective backup method when combined with ChronoSync. It’s a best of both worlds: offsite, encrypted and as-incremental-as-you-want. I’m working on a writeup and will post it soon.

I even want to try JungleDisk with rsync, scheduled using launchd, cron’s successor.

(disclosure: I’m a programmer at SpiderOak). But seriously, I want my stuff offsite and accessible from my laptop when I’m on the road.

I was willing to listen to what jwz had to say until I read this pithy quote:

If you’re using Windows, go fuck yourself.

And that’s when I stopped reading.

Merlin, you shouldn’t praise people who have such an immature attitude. It’s people like jwz who give Mac users a reputation of being arrogant.

I took this advice back before Leopard came out, and if I had to do it now, I’d do things a little differently.

First, I’d probably just buy an off-the-shelf external drive rather than trying to match the one in my machine and putting it in an enclosure. (By the way, a lot of cheap external enclosures don’t sleep when idle. I found a MacAlly one that does). Either that, or one of the new Time Capsule doohickeys.

Secondly, I’d probably use Amazon S3 to do my off-site backup, and probably do it a little more often than once a month.

Sure, in the event of a catastrophic failure, it’s a bit more work to recover, but the data’s there and hard drives don’t go bad often enough (assuming you’re not one of those idiots that stops them from spinning down) to make that a big deal.

I liked the 2 conditions given on MacBreak Weekly for making a backup “real”: automated, and offsite rotation. And…

In the 1970s, I worked on mainframe computers, and a wise wise person checked the bug logs for IBM’s DDR backup utility. There were thousands of bug reports against the utility, most of which represented somebody not being able to restore their data.

So I’d like to add a 3rd condition: try restoring something. anything. regularly. The practice will be good for you, and if it fails … well, that’s good. that you know. and can fix it.

I’d like to suggest caution on using your workplace for storage of your off-site backup. If you have ANYTHING you wouldn’t want someone accidentally seeing (monkey porn) keep it under lock and key or encrypted.

Rsync backup: good
Incremental backup: better
Offsite incremental backup to low-cost networked file storage service: best

Ibid: Incremental backups to infinite disk

Cheers,
- Bob

I set up such a system when this was first linked from 43folders, but it didn’t do the auto-magical thing. I realized that my system was set to put hard drives to sleep whenever possible, which I think is the default in OS X. With the box unchecked I get backups every night without thinking about it.

I recently noticed people linking to this advice and put my snippy comments on it here.