With the new year and new operating system install on my mac, I’ve finally gotten serious about backups (again). After a few years of essentially no backups for my day-to-day system, Apple has inspired me by making constant backups simple with Time Machine.
You can read about Time Machine all over the Net, so I won’t waste time explaining why it’s so simple, but I will point out that the current price of hard drives and blank DVDs are so cheap, tape backups seems like a completely foreign concept. I’m currently using 750GB of disk to backup my 200GB notebook hard drive. If this seems like massive overkill, it’s because it is. In my defense the total cost of all this disk (in two external cases) was $270. One disk is a 500GB External with USB2/Firewire/ESATA interfaces, this drive is my Time Machine backup. I expect that there’s months of incremental backup space using this drive. The other is a USB2 bus-powered 2.5″ 250GB drive, that is a bootable clone of my internal drive; meant as an emergency recovery disk (especially while traveling). I’m using Carbon Copy Cloner to populate the latter, since it appears this functionality isn’t supported by Time Machine. Unfortunately, I’ll need to manually hook-up an sync the bootable clone, but this isn’t too bad since it appears that that the new versions of CCC supports synchronization well.
I also took the liberty of burning a duplicate of my Leopard install disk, and sticking it into the liner of my laptop case. I shouldn’t need it as long as the clone drive is with me, but I could have bailed out at least one other Mac owner at a conference last year had I had it with me.
While all of my friends using RAID 1 on their systems have been extolling this idea for years; mirroring isn’t a backup strategy (just ask anyone with Quickbooks).