One of my hard drives died last week. However I was not that concerned about about loosing my data since I have several layers of backup and redundancy. I'm now feeling very safe and confident with my current home data backup solution. When I moved to an iMac as my primary home computer I took a look at my old backup solutions and made some refinements to my backup strategy.
Here is an executive summary for those that don't want the details. If it is not in at least 3 places it doesn't exist: Time Machine, Drobo, BackBlaze**, and DropBox*
Here is an executive summary for those that don't want the details. If it is not in at least 3 places it doesn't exist: Time Machine, Drobo, BackBlaze**, and DropBox*
However, before we get to my backup solution I want to share with you an
inventory of my various data files that I want to backup.
All of this data is currently stored on the
following hardware:
So the first location for my files is on the original hard drive. When I out grow that space I will either move to a larger drive or archive some of the less used files to my Drobo storage drive.
For my second location I have been relying on the backup software that comes with my Mac.
One of the best aspects of being on a Mac is the Time Machine backup software that is included in the most recent version of the operating system. This backup software takes hourly snapshots of your hard drives and stores them on your backup drive. The best part of this solution is it is automated. You set it and can forget it. If you have to rely on burning CD/DVDs or performing manual backups to external drives on a regular basis, it will never get done. They key is automation.
Here is a small snip-it from Apple's marketing page:
The third backup location I have is an off-site backup. I think it is critically important that your files need to be backed-up to an off-site location. If all your files are stored at home they are susceptible to theft, flood, or fire and all of your files can be destroyed. In the past I used to use one of my webservers at collocation as a remote backup location. However as my data storage needs grew I was not able to keep a complete backup of my important files off-site.
There are now several backup service providers that make remote off-site backup very economical and convenient. For a while I was using Mozy.com to host my remote backups. About a year ago I switched to Backblaze.com** The main reason for the switch is they seem to have more bandwidth and my backups to their servers are faster.
For $50 a year I can backup as much data as I want to their servers. Currently I have about 800GB backed up with them (I'm not backing up my large movie files in iTunes since I have the original DVD's.) The best part about BackBlaze is that it sits in the background and continuously backs up newer files to their cloud based storage. It is another one of those set it and forget it solutions. When disaster struck one of my PC's I was able to have them send me a hard drive with all of my files for an easy restore.
The fourth back-implementation I recently started to employ is for my time sensitive files. These are primarily the documents that I'm currently working on and I also want to share with my computer in my office. For this I'm using the free version of the cloud based storage called Dropbox*
The great thing about Dropbox is they give you 2GB of free storage with the basic account. This cloud based storage gives me quick and easy access to my critical and sometimes time sensitive files that I can access from any computer in the world. They also have an iPhone app that gives you the ability to access your files from your phone (an Android version is coming soon.) It works by creating a shared folder on your hard drive. As you add files to this DropBox folder it gets automatically copied up to their servers. If you have the DropBox client on other computers those new files are sync'd to those computers as well. This is an excellent way to share files that need to be on multiple computers at once.
I also recently started using a Mac based software package called SuperDuper! The free version of the software will make an exact copy of your primary hard drive that can be used to boot from. So if my primary hard drive dies on my iMac I can boot from this rescue disk to grab or transfer files as necessary. I could also boot from this rescue disk via my MacBook and would have all of my files available from the iMac. This is another nice feature that is available from the Mac platform.
I maybe overly cautious but this is the backup solution I have created to ensure I don't loose any data. In addition to these backup solutions I'm also employing some hardware based redundancy so that I don't loose data caused by a failed hard drive. This solution is in place to minimize the downtime any hardware failure would cause.
- As a hobbyist photographer I have created a very large library of photos. I currently have over 50,0000 photos that take up over 400GB of drive space.
- I also recently started shooting video and I already have 14GB of files created in the last year.
- My iTunes music and video folder checks in at more than 600GB.
- As part of my development work I also maintain several virtual machines that take about 250GB of storage.
- My documents and other miscellaneous
files take about 1GB of drive space.
All of this data is currently stored on the
following hardware:- iMac with 2TB of internal storage
- Drobo
(1st generation USB) drive with 3TB of storage used as my time machine
backup drive
- Drobo (2nd generation FireWire 800) with 4TB of
storage. I have this partitioned as two 2TB volumes. One volume is my
rescue, the second volume is for deep storage. These drives are not
backed up.
- All files don't really exist unless they are in 3 locations.
- One of the backup locations needs to be off-site.
- Time sensitive files need to also exist in a 4th cloud based location.
So the first location for my files is on the original hard drive. When I out grow that space I will either move to a larger drive or archive some of the less used files to my Drobo storage drive.
For my second location I have been relying on the backup software that comes with my Mac.
One of the best aspects of being on a Mac is the Time Machine backup software that is included in the most recent version of the operating system. This backup software takes hourly snapshots of your hard drives and stores them on your backup drive. The best part of this solution is it is automated. You set it and can forget it. If you have to rely on burning CD/DVDs or performing manual backups to external drives on a regular basis, it will never get done. They key is automation.
Here is a small snip-it from Apple's marketing page:
Set it, then forget it.
Time Machine works with your Mac and an external hard drive. Just connect the drive and assign it to Time Machine and you're a step closer to enjoying peace of mind. Time Machine will automatically back up your entire Mac, including system files, applications, accounts, preferences, music, photos, movies, and documents. But what makes Time Machine different from other backup applications is that it not only keeps a spare copy of every file, it remembers how your system looked on a given day -- so you can revisit your Mac as it appeared in the past.
Every change, every hour.
Following the initial backup of your entire Mac, Time Machine automatically makes incremental backups every hour, every day, copying just the files that have changed since your last backup. And it does this all in the background, so you can continue working while Time Machine is busy copying your files. Time Machine saves the hourly backups for the past 24 hours, daily backups for the past month, and weekly backups for everything older than a month.
If you are on the Windows platform you have the included Microsoft backup software (but without the time machine niceties) and several other backup software solutions. There are also a couple of solutions that try to mimic the Time Machine experience for windows: Genie Soft & Altaro
The third backup location I have is an off-site backup. I think it is critically important that your files need to be backed-up to an off-site location. If all your files are stored at home they are susceptible to theft, flood, or fire and all of your files can be destroyed. In the past I used to use one of my webservers at collocation as a remote backup location. However as my data storage needs grew I was not able to keep a complete backup of my important files off-site.
There are now several backup service providers that make remote off-site backup very economical and convenient. For a while I was using Mozy.com to host my remote backups. About a year ago I switched to Backblaze.com** The main reason for the switch is they seem to have more bandwidth and my backups to their servers are faster.
For $50 a year I can backup as much data as I want to their servers. Currently I have about 800GB backed up with them (I'm not backing up my large movie files in iTunes since I have the original DVD's.) The best part about BackBlaze is that it sits in the background and continuously backs up newer files to their cloud based storage. It is another one of those set it and forget it solutions. When disaster struck one of my PC's I was able to have them send me a hard drive with all of my files for an easy restore.
The fourth back-implementation I recently started to employ is for my time sensitive files. These are primarily the documents that I'm currently working on and I also want to share with my computer in my office. For this I'm using the free version of the cloud based storage called Dropbox*
The great thing about Dropbox is they give you 2GB of free storage with the basic account. This cloud based storage gives me quick and easy access to my critical and sometimes time sensitive files that I can access from any computer in the world. They also have an iPhone app that gives you the ability to access your files from your phone (an Android version is coming soon.) It works by creating a shared folder on your hard drive. As you add files to this DropBox folder it gets automatically copied up to their servers. If you have the DropBox client on other computers those new files are sync'd to those computers as well. This is an excellent way to share files that need to be on multiple computers at once.
I also recently started using a Mac based software package called SuperDuper! The free version of the software will make an exact copy of your primary hard drive that can be used to boot from. So if my primary hard drive dies on my iMac I can boot from this rescue disk to grab or transfer files as necessary. I could also boot from this rescue disk via my MacBook and would have all of my files available from the iMac. This is another nice feature that is available from the Mac platform.
I maybe overly cautious but this is the backup solution I have created to ensure I don't loose any data. In addition to these backup solutions I'm also employing some hardware based redundancy so that I don't loose data caused by a failed hard drive. This solution is in place to minimize the downtime any hardware failure would cause.
As I mentioned one of my
hard drives died last week. One of the reasons I was not worried is
that the drive was inside my Drobo storage device. They call it a data
storage robot since they use an intelligent raid like system to join
multiple drives into a protected volume of drive space. So if one of the
drives die your data is still available and protected. The drive that
died was a 500GB drive and I replaced it with a 1TB drive for about $80.
The image below shows that I now have 3 1TB drives and a 500GB drive. If I need more space I just replace the 500GB drive with a bigger version (probably 1.5TB or 2TB in the future.)
I maybe going over board but I feel that I'm better safe than sorry when it comes to protecting my data. I also want to point out that a good backup strategy doesn't have to be expensive. External 1-2TB USB drives can be bought for about $100 and off-site backup with services like BackBlaze** are only $50 a year. There is really no reason why you shouldn't invest that much to protect your files.
* Disclosure: this is a referral link that grants me free extra storage if you sign-up.
** Disclosure: this is an associate link that gives me a commission if you sign-up.
The image below shows that I now have 3 1TB drives and a 500GB drive. If I need more space I just replace the 500GB drive with a bigger version (probably 1.5TB or 2TB in the future.)
This is not
the only computer in our household and sadly I haven't been as
conscientious about maintaining a good backup strategy for them.
I have an old 13" MacBook that is primary used as web reading device and new content is not created on it. I have a good time machine backup of that on a spare external drive that can be used to restore from any hardware failure.
My daughter's new iMac has an external drive directly attached that is used by Time Machine to backup the primary hard drive. There is no off-site backup for this computer and I'm thinking of getting a BackBlaze account for this computer as well.
My
wife's computer (my old Windows 7 PC) had a document backup about month
ago but it has suffered hardware failure again and is currently out of
commission. Ideally I want to get her onto the Mac platform as well. But
if I can get the PC up and running again I'm going to look at one of
the Windows time machine solutions I mentioned above for her backup
system and also adding her to BackBlaze as well.I have an old 13" MacBook that is primary used as web reading device and new content is not created on it. I have a good time machine backup of that on a spare external drive that can be used to restore from any hardware failure.
My daughter's new iMac has an external drive directly attached that is used by Time Machine to backup the primary hard drive. There is no off-site backup for this computer and I'm thinking of getting a BackBlaze account for this computer as well.
I maybe going over board but I feel that I'm better safe than sorry when it comes to protecting my data. I also want to point out that a good backup strategy doesn't have to be expensive. External 1-2TB USB drives can be bought for about $100 and off-site backup with services like BackBlaze** are only $50 a year. There is really no reason why you shouldn't invest that much to protect your files.
* Disclosure: this is a referral link that grants me free extra storage if you sign-up.
** Disclosure: this is an associate link that gives me a commission if you sign-up.