backup

Yes. Another Backup Lecture.

Merlin — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 19:35:58 -0400

Daring Fireball: An Ode to DiskWarrior, SuperDuper, and Dropbox

Hard drives are fragile. Read as much as you can bear to about how they work, how incredibly precisely they must operate in order to cram so many bits onto such small disks. It’s a miracle to me that they work at all. Every hard drive in the world will eventually fail. Assume that yours are all on the cusp of failure at all times. It’s good to be spooked about how long your hard drives will last.

John's article, advice, and success story about doing smart backup is exactly the reminder that a lot of people need to hear right this second. Because, it's impossible to overstate the importance of automated, redundant, and rotated backups. Trust me. You will need them all. Soon. Repeatedly. Forever. Always.

Worst of all, every stupid cliche about backup that currently makes you roll your eyes in exasperation will be visited upon you tenfold if you're not using some flavor of the anal-retentive system nerds like John and I live by. Because, unfortunately, most people you know (including me) have already repeatedly been struck by backup's biggest and most profound cliche:

Perform automated, redundant, and rotated backups as often as you can afford to lose every single bit of information that's been changed or added since your last backup. Because it's going to go away.

The Holy Trinity

Seriously:

If it's not automated, it's not a real backup.
If it's not redundant, it's not a real backup.
If it's not regularly rotated off-site, it's not a real backup.

Doing any one of these things by itself or in tandem produces "a copy." A copy is handy, and it may really save you, even a majority of the time. But, making casual copies is optimistic at best. Someday, you will need the benefits of all three layers, and you'll thank John, me, and your chosen $diety that you sweated all those years of monkey work and aggravation.

The Next Layer

I do have three suggestions to append to John's excellent setup:

Schedule Every Rotation; Then Do it. Peg your off-site rotation to a date-certain (like how you probably changed the 9-volt in your smoke alarm for Daylight Savings Time yesterday). I do my rotations within the first five days of each new month. So, yes, do automate the creation of backups, but then also do the physical rotation like you'd pay your mortgage. On time and without fail.¹
Make and Update Specialized Disk Images. If the photos of your baby, the videos of your wedding, or those gigs of torrented Radiohead MP3s you've hoarded mean anything to you, give them extra-special treatment. At least every six months or so, burn them all onto drive(s) and rotate them off-site too. Either stick them in a safe-deposit box, or, even better, burn a new DVD of your kid's progress every month, then mail it to the relatives. Distributed backup plus familial bonding = win/win.
Make and Update Multiple "Go-Sticks". Buy a bunch of good 4GB+ USB sticks and use them to hold 256-bit-encrypted sparsebundles of your "Holy Shit!" files. Keychains, 1Password files, bank account numbers, insurance records, etc. Anything you need to either start recovering from a catastrophe or go on the lam. Make multiples, schedule update reminders, swap them out in known locations, and, if you have the skillz, maybe set up an Automator script that automatically updates the contents of each drive whenever you plug the little buggers in.

You're so sick of hearing this: automated, redundant, and rotated.

The Godfather of Ass-Saving

Also, a second high-five for DiskWarrior. I can't count the number of times that this annoying, ugly, slow, and hard-to-use application has saved every last strip of my bacon. Like John says, yeah, start with Disk Utility, because it's got 90+% of the firepower needed to fix the disk problems you'll encounter this year. But, DiskWarrior will do everything right up to the impossible. And, again, yes: you will need it. I sure have.

Go. Do it. Now.

Backup is boring, it's tedious, and it's not cheap. But once you've had your ass handed to you by a badly-broken drive, you really get the importance of a zero-latency recovery. It's positively liberating.

But, for now, right this second: go Gmail your kid's baby pictures to yourself. Do it.

I realize I'm asking you to buy a lot of hard drives here. Can't change that, but I will say I've been very satisfied with 1TB Seagate Barracudas from New Egg (Personally, I buy them five at a time and always have at least 3 spares). The performance is fine, if unremarkable, in both my Macs and my two Drobos. Plus, the price is right, and New Egg is, in my experience, a proven and bulletproof retailer. Also, if you're the tidy type, you can cheaply pick up a case of Wiebetech boxes to transport and store your naked drives. ↩

”Yes. Another Backup Lecture.” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on March 15, 2010. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

jwz: Classic backup advice

Merlin — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 11:18:09 -0500

jwz - PSA: backups

This forum question about a comment I made on the most recent MacBreak Weekly reminds me that I mention jwz's advice on backup often enough that it's worth reposting the URL (as well as making sure credit goes where it's due). On the one hand, his advice could hardly be simpler (that's one reason I like it), but how many of us have taken the time to put a mature backup regime in place?

If you value your data, can't tolerate downtime, and are casting about for a thorough solution, consider giving this a try.

"OMG, three drives is so expensive! That sounds like a hassle!" Shut up. I know things. You will listen to me. Do it anyway.

”jwz: Classic backup advice” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on January 21, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

A Tale of Disk Crashing Woe, and the Utilities That Saved Me

wood.tang — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 15:40:21 -0400

Apologies if I'm a little cranky, but I've suffered two hard drive crashes in as many weeks, and while I was able to recover somewhat gracefully, the aggravation of watching plodding status bars for hours on end while I wait for my data to load has been unbearable. Fortunately, my wife has employed Bobby Knight-proof safety features in our home office and chained everything to the desk, or else I would have chucked it all out the window.

But since I'm finally back online, I wanted to give a tip of the binder clip to three little programs that saved my bacon during these past two weeks, one crowd favorite and two lowly OS X utilities:

SuperDuper! - The People's Champ was responsible for idiot-proofing my backup process, so I had multiple pristine copies of my data. Worth every penny.
Disk Utility - The built-in OS X disk wrangler helped me juggle my various images and FireWire drives like a clown on speed.
Migration Assistant - But despite SuperDuper's and Disk Utility's heroic efforts, this little beauty was the clear choice for MVP. I don't know how I never knew there was a utility that could pull all my data, settings, and installed apps directly from one computer to another, but credit goes to the Michigan Avenue Apple Store Genius here in Chicago who tipped me off to this little gem, saving me from even more hours installing apps and tracking down license keys. A++++, would do business with again.

I had been planning to write a post wondering aloud as to why so many of you try to keep multiple machines in sync, but being stuck with one bare bones Mini and a dying MacBook Pro knocked some sense into me. The word of the day is redundancy, kids. I learned my lesson.

”A Tale of Disk Crashing Woe, and the Utilities That Saved Me” was written by Matt Wood for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on October 18, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"