I'll start this article on the black art of backing up with two aphorisms that highlight the problems and importance of regularly backing up your data:
There are two sorts of computer users, those that don't back up, and those that wish they had!
and
Data does not exist on your computer unless it exists in two places.
In short. At some time your computer will break and you will loose data. At this point in time backups will suddenly become immensely important and like 95% of computer users you will suddenly realise the truth of the second aphorism.
So, if backups are so important, then why do so few people do them. The main reason is probably that backing up is hard to set up and unless automatic, easy to forget to do. Another reason is that people fail to see the need. They perceive their computer as the valuable item in their life while in reality the valuable commodity is the data stored on the computer. Lets hope that by the end of this article you will be in a better position to get your self backed up.
So, how do you back up? Well, the quickest method is simply to slap a CD or DVD into your Mac, copy all your important data to a burn folder and hit the burn button. Instant backup. Of a sort. Most people who use this method end up with an irregular and haphazard backup that is barely better than no backup at all. Any back up strategy needs to be considered, regular and detailed. In addition to this there is the problem of what sort of backup do you do. A simple backup just copies your files from one place to another, and is often overwritten each night by the next backup, while an incremental backup will back your machine up and then add nay changed files each time. Preserving your old data. What sort should you do, and why?
The easiest backup to start straight away is a regular (nightly) backup to an external hard drive. In the event of the hard drive on your Mac failing you will then have a copy that you can reinstall on your machine, recovering all your lost data. This type of backup is easy to automate via any number of backup utilities, chief among which is the application Super Duper. This creates a copy of your entire machine onto a selected hard drive at a selected time every day. Best of all this backup is bootable. This means that you can connect your Mac to the drive and start it up from the backup, meaning that should you be on a pressing deadline you will be back up and working within minutes of your Macs hard drive failing. "Great" you might think. "Surely that's all I need". Well yes but mainly no. This incremental backup will restore your machine to you, but it will not protect you against two different sorts of problems. Should you delete a file accidentally but not notice until you back up, the file will be gone as the new backup will over write the old one. Also should your system become damaged this damaged system will be copied each night and you may find that your supposedly bootable backup fails to do so just when it's needed.
As with most things in life the answer is to have a system. A master bootable backup of your machine should exist on an external drive, a firewire drive if you have a PPC Mac since only Firewire drives will boot a PPC Mac, or a firewire or USB drive should your Mac be an Intel machine. In this case your drive MUST be formatted correctly to allow your machine to boot. A list of format types etc is at the end of this article.
So you have your bootable backup. This should be kept safe for emergencies. If you update the system software on your Mac, that's the time to redo this master boot backup. Now you're safe to setup a nightly backup onto another drive via Super Duper. In most cases of drive failure this backup should work but in a worst case scenario you will have your master boot backup to turn to to get your Mac running again.
And so, onto incremental backups. Until the advent of OS X 10.5 this was a thorny subject that revolved around applications such as Retrospect, the grandaddy of backup software that was heavily used in corporate environments but has fallen out of favour as hard drives have grown larger. Now, with 10.5, Apple has introduced Time Machine and no one has an excuse not to back up. Time Machine automatically backs up your whole drive to a designated external device (wirelessly in the case of Time capsule). After this it simply checks every hour and copiers any files that have changed. This means that any deleted file can be recovered. It's worth remembering that a time machine backup is not bootable so should your Mac's drive crash, you will need to install both a new drive and a new OS onto that drive before recovering your data. You should also remember that after a while your time machine drive will fill up and Time machine will start to delete old files to make room for new ones.
To solve this problem, the final part of your backup strategy should be the archiving of your older data onto optical storage (CD or DVD), ideally to comply with our second aphorism this data should be archived onto two discs. These discs should be stored in a dark environment to prevent optical decay. Of course with the price of hard drives falling all the time you may also end up archiving work onto duplicated hard drives.
Outside of time machine your choice for incremental backup is limited. Retrospect is still available but can be obscure to configure.
Putting it all together, a robust backup system should encompass the following
An initial bootable backup of your Mac, it's data and OS. This can be created using Super Duper, Carbon Copy Cloner or similar and should be renewed every month or so or whenever you update your system.
A nightly duplication of your machine to an external drive using a scheduled back up utility such as Super Duper or CCC.
An incremental backup of your data onto an external drive via Time Machine, Retrospect or similar
A duplicated archive of old data onto DVD, CD or HDD.
For the truly paranoid (or well prepared) it is worth while considering a worst case scenario. What would happen in the event of a fire? Your Mac plus all your careful backups might well be destroyed at the same time. In this final case the answer is off site backup. Mac owners are again well served with .mac which offers automated backup of critical data over the internet to Apple servers, but a similar service e is available from Amazon and other online servers.
In short, there really is no excuse for not being backed up.
Should you want to make sure you have all the bases covered then I am more than happy to help source backup technology and configure your strategy. While It's always good for business to charge to recover clients lost data, it can be a painful process and I wouldn't wish the stress and potentially business destroying costs on anyone.
Mac boot drive configurations
PPC Macs (G3, G4 or G5 and older)
Require a firewire drive to boot. Must be formatted as Apple Partition Map
Intel Mac (Core Duo etc)
Can boot from either Firewire or USB drives. Drive must be formatted as GUID Partition table
