Comments on: MacOS X Backup Strategy

By: Graphic designer in Phx

Graphic designer in Phx — Sat, 12 Aug 2006 00:18:00 +0000

I just bought an external Western Digital, Book Pro, 500 gig, Firewire 800 drive and I think I am going to partition it like you suggested. That way I can make one partition a backup drive (mirror) The drive came with Retrospect Express, but it seems like it has a learning curve on it.

By: mhenders

mhenders — Wed, 10 May 2006 17:13:26 +0000

Hi Frank,

If I were you, I would probably buy a single external drive, partition it into two partitions:

Mirror (100GB)
Archives (the rest)

As for brands, I recently bought LaCie and Maxtor, both of which have given me problems (disk problems). Our system administrator just bought for our main office Seagate drives. It seems that in general as disks get larger, their mean time to failure seems to go down, but probably in the future I'll buy Seagate until that brand also demonstrates problems.

By: Frank Morley

Frank Morley — Wed, 10 May 2006 16:54:36 +0000

I am a recent Mac convert and have a Powerbook G4 running Tiger 10.4.6. I have yet to implement a backup process, so I was very interested in your fine article. I intend to follow it as closely as I can. But first I need to purchase at least one Firewire External hard drive. I would rather purchase complete unit(s) rather than building my own. I would appreciate any advice and recommendations you have about the available hardware. I am reading conflicting views about reliablity of Maxtor, LaCie, OWC, etc. My intention would be to a mirror of my 100GB internal drive and then do your suggested archiving. Would I need two separate external hard dirves to accomplish this?

Thnaks for your time and assisatnce.

Frank

By: Website designer in Exeter

Website designer in Exeter — Fri, 28 Apr 2006 10:55:10 +0000

I really need a backup solution that can wake a sleeping Mac… I’ve got Retropect 6 workgroup but if the worst bit of software I’ve ever used!

By: Josh

Josh — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 04:53:42 +0000

Hey Matt, thank you so much for this blog. It has a lot of good info that we can use. I work for a non-profit mission and this is our senario. We have a tower with two drives. The main one is use for the system and work, the second is the back up drive. This computer is networked through a hub to three other computers. At the moment I am using Silverkeeper, but i can't get the other computers to back up over the network to the second drive. if the main computer is sleeping, then nothing works. i would like to back up all four computers ever night to the back up drive in the main computer tower. do you have any suggestions that would help make that work? Also when i do manually back up files and docements, i run into permission issues. I don't know much about 'permissions' so if you have some advice there too, it would be greatly appreciated. thanks.

I must say that enjoy the concept of the internet, because there is so much info out there and now everyone can learn from each other. really cool. anyway, thanks in advance for your help.

Josh

By: mkb

mkb — Thu, 30 Mar 2006 01:55:01 +0000

Thanks for writing this. I am updating my backup strategy, and detailed info on how others back up is a big help.

I was burned by .Mac backup when my PowerBook drive failed recently. Every few days I was copying my entire drive via rsync to a volume attached to my Mini. Nightly .Mac backups took care of the files which change often. Unfortunately, Backup's restore option would run for hours, showing no movement on the progress bar. Eventually it would crap out. With a mixture of the command line and Finder I found that I could manually extract key files, but the process was tedious.

So, I'm looking for a new option for incremental backups and archiving. Synchronize! Pro X and ChronoSync are the top contenders. Have you used ChronoSync more since you wrote this piece? If you have any insight into how the two apps compare, I would love to read it.

Thanks,

--mkb

By: Mark

Mark — Sat, 11 Mar 2006 15:49:22 +0000

There were several tools here that I haven’t seen before. I’ll have to check them out.

I backup my system using the Disk Utility which works nicely because I can use my external hard drive to boot up my system on another Mac if mine goes down. http://www.digital501.com/2006021110/mac-backup-osx/

By: Darren Frost

Darren Frost — Fri, 03 Mar 2006 14:38:17 +0000

Matt: Hope Spain is treating you well, and you and family are cool. I am still living in New Jersey, but my client is Fannie Mae, in DC. No real contact with folks in Duluth other than my parents.

Thought of you when my brother-in-law was signed by a UK label and decide they want to move to Spain.

Darren

By: paulio

paulio — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 20:53:18 +0000

Retrospect has always been a big problem. Every client that I have ever had who has used Retrospect, has had problems with data loss of some type, whether it be subtle data loss like file modification dates being changed to the backup date, or more obvious data loss like files not being backed up at all, or files not able to be restored off the backup medium. It does not matter to me whether the problem is actual bugs in Retrospect, or user error resulting from the confusing user interface and options. Either way, I discourage the use of Retrospect.

The one thing that has always worked for me is Carbon Copy Cloner. It does one thing well. It's free. It has never let me down.

By: enoch root

enoch root — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 06:03:37 +0000

The easiest way to take a snapshot of an external drive is to buy another external drive, mirror to it, and take it off-site.

Hard drives are cheap.

Here's another concern: I'd like to make backups that are secure from prying eyes. I suppose the best way (or at least the most obvious solution) would be to make an encrypted disk image and then backup to it. Has anyone had any luck with this? How about just turning on FileSafe and then backing up your home directory's disk image?