Like most people, I tend to do a poor job of backing up my data. I’ve been bitten by the consequences of my carelessness before, and am finally doing something about it, albeit a bit too late.
In August of 2003, my PC’s hard drive crashed, taking everything with it. I had a single 3.5” floppy with my most important files backed up on it, which had last been updated the preceding December.
You would think that I learned a lesson, that as a professional in the field, I would know better, but habit is a powerful drug. The lack of a proper backup solution nagged at me, but that was all.
At least with the appearance of Time Machine in Mac OS X Leopard, I was able to do a little something. If nothing else, I made sure I always had a spare external drive for this purpose.
My instinct is to point you to John Gruber’s An Ode to DiskWarrior, SuperDuper, and Dropbox, or Merlin Mann’s Yes. Another Backup Lecture. and leave it at that. And why not? They cover the topic better and more thoroughly than I could, and those were the articles that stuck in my mind throughout 2010.
I get paid biweekly, and last month was one of those times when I got three paychecks instead of two (in fact, last year was one of those rare years when my coworkers and I got twenty-seven paychecks instead of twenty-six). I decided to quit stalling and purchase the hardware needed to do “real backups,” as defined by Merlin Mann.
I have a 2005 Mac mini (PowerPC) that I use as a home media server, a 2007 iMac, and that rare breed of aluminum MacBook that only existed for eight months, before Apple decided that aluminum meant “Pro.”
The Mac mini has a 1TB external hard drive attached to it with all my digital media, so that means four hard drives that need to be backed up. Because anything worth doing is worth overdoing, I purchased a docking station, ten 1TB internal hard drives, and a set of cases to store them in.
Last night, Thursday, everything was finally delivered, so I got to work. The initial backup of my laptop took four hours. With only one docking station, the first round of backups is going to take a very long time. Tonight, I opted to backup my external drive of media files. I was out of ports, so I had to root around for an old USB hub. Finally, at about 8:00 p.m., everything was hooked up and I started copying my digital media.
Naturally, that drive failed about sixty seconds later.
Allegedly, my Time Capsule has a backup only a few hours old. I’m attempting to make a copy of that backup as I type, but the process will take until morning.
May I suggest you look into doing some real backups of your own?