1. Set up Time Machine

If you aren’t using Time Machine, it’s time to start. This is your first, best line of defense on a desktop or laptop. Backups made using the built-in OS X feature are non-intrusive, and recovery of files is nearly instant. Although external hard drive prices are high right now, most everyone will benefit with Time Machine. Hook up an external hard drive and OS X will ask you to use it for Time Machine. I generally recommend getting a hard drive 1.5 times the size of your internal drive.

2. Set up online backup the proper way

I suggest online backup services as your second line of defense. It’s important to keep backups offsite in case of a disaster or theft at your location. If you do your initial backup all at once it can take months and you’ll find you are missing a key file just when you need it — I wrote about how to optimize your strategy here – and be sure to leave your computer on and awake if you want your backup strategy to work. Also, please remember that sync software like Dropbox isn’t a true online backup system, since it has the ability to remove files.

3. Back up your online email system

If you use online email systems such as Gmail, you need to back that up as well. Don’t rely 100% on your provider. Your account could get hacked, or you could accidentally delete your email. Follow this guide on backing up your Gmail using POP access. A similar strategy would be applicable to Hotmail, AOL and Yahoo (though Yahoo may require a paid upgrade to do it).

4. Test your backups

I’ve written about this before, but if you aren’t testing your backups, how do you know if they’re working? Do you know how to restore in case of disaster? Trust but verify as they say. Simply try restoring files from your backups to make sure they work as expected.

5. Back up your iOS devices

With iCloud, backing up to your computer isn’t technically necessary because you can restore from the cloud. On a practical level though, that takes time, and there’s also no guarantee your backup will always be there when you need it. At least every month, it’s important to hook up your iOS device to your computer for a quick and immediate backup of your data. To do a manual backup via iTunes, follow these instructions.

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That’s why I was happy to see new iOS app Video Time Machine ($0.99) take a different approach to mobile content discovery. As its name suggests, Video Time Machine allows a user to take a trip back in time, to check out audio and video clips organized by year, going all the way back to 1860, with the first sound ever recorded. It’s an app-based client for the content on YTTM.TV, an archive of videos from the past that surfaces content based on the year and content type (commercials, sports, etc.) chosen by the user.

Video Time Machine basically just pulls content from the website, and puts it in a very touch-friendly wrapper, but that’s all it took to make watching movies on my iPhone (and iPad) feel like a novel experience. Part of that is because the content I’m checking out is very rarely something I’d come across on Twitter, Facebook, or through any recommendation engines that plug into my regular daily consumption habits. I don’t want to “discover” things I already like, you see; I want to check out things I’d never come across on my own.

In a world where finding content consists mainly of services or people saying “you like this and this, so you should also like this” or “your friend likes this and you like your friend, so you should also like this,” trying out an app where the locus for what content gets surfaced exists outside of the individual doing the searching feels like a revolution. It reintroduced one key element that few recommendation engines can claim to achieve: the ability to surprise oneself. Good surprises might require a bit of input from the user along general lines, but as highly personal recommendations narrow the scope of what they’ll offer you, they also exclude a much larger cross-section of content. Striking a balance using input from the user, and criteria that are pre-selected through other means would make for more serendipitous finds.

I don’t think the appeal of Video Time Machine only works because of the type of content it offers, either. I’d love to see an app discovery tool that uses some other similar contextual criteria to group titles together, too. App releases organized by date would be cool, or by most frequently updated, or even by more irreverent coincidental similarities, like all apps that use a bird in their icon. It might not be as good at pigeonholing the average customer, but it would offer an alternative approach for users, who, like me, are tired of having their social graph mined for the purposes of being fed the same old content over and over again.

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A good backup strategy is generally something simple and automated. You “set it and forget it,” but you really shouldn’t. In my day job, I see too many teary eyes from people who thought data was backed up but it wasn’t. Just this week I had my own little panic attack when I realized Time Machine hadn’t run in a week. Somehow I accidentally unplugged the FireWire cable moving things around and my Mac really didn’t warn me Time Machine wasn’t running. Ouch.

Too often I see backup systems “glitch.” Maybe the hard drive was corrupt or a folder was moved. Unless you check backup logs way closer than everyone, you don’t find out the backup failed until you try to do a restore — and the time to do that restore isn’t when you are missing data. Even reviewing logs is no substitute for testing.

Ultimately, backing up your data isn’t important, but restoring it is! If you don’t know how, now is the time to open up the manual or call tech support and find out. Time Machine, of course is built into Mac OS, so no additional software is necessary, and Apple’s tech support can help you with it. If it’s an online backup service, do you remember your password? For local backups, do you have the software to do the restoration? Does someone else in your family or organization know how to do the restore in your absence?

Once you know how to do a restore, the key is to actually try it, and do it regularly. This is no matter how bulletproof you think your strategy is. No software or process is foolproof and do you really want to pay for forensic-style data recovery like Drivesavers? I recommend creating a short list of files to restore. Mine usually includes the following:

1. Absolutely mission critical files. The files you are least willing to lose. For me that’s my financial data, my customer list and my calendar. Each time I test a restore I choose one of these. Most people also choose their pictures, but I leave pictures to the spouse.
2. Critical folders. These can be broad. I use my main business folder as the test restore. When doing a restore, I always restore this folder.
3. Important stuff. These are files that would be nice to have, but you could live without. For many, this may include their iTunes data. You could repurchase or re-import these items but it would be a pain. For the important stuff, just pick a few files at random.

When you do a test restore, you’ll want to make sure to restore the files to an alternate location — don’t accidentally overwrite your current version.

How often to test? That’s a difficult question and ultimately is answered by “how much data are you willing to lose?” Testing too often becomes tedious and is quickly abandoned, but waiting too long to test could lead to data loss. For no particular reason, I’ve determined once a month is a good strategy for me. Because my most critical data is financial, I run a test backup each time I do a reconcile. The process usually takes less than five minutes and I keep a quick spreadsheet of which files to test.

What have you got to lose by spending five minutes a month testing your backups by doing a restore? Just your data…that’s all.

I love Time Machine for its simplicity and the fact that it’s free. Apple did the right thing in creating a backup utility that was integrated into the OS and was actually useful. Anyone who has fought with Windows Backup can tell you, this has been needed for a long time. Apple created a beautiful backup  utility and then made money on hardware that seamlessly works with it. For the home user, nothing could be more simple.

In the office environment however, users tend to backup to server shares and not local external drives. So, let’s take a look at how to use Time Machine over a network.

Setting it Up

It’s easy to do this in Leopard Xserve by sharing a backup folder. Under Server Admin, you can check the box “Enable as Time Machine backup destination.”

This worked great in Leopard but in Snow Leopard, Time Machine no longer saw this as an available destination. Luckily, changing a property for System Preferences solves this.

Enter this command in Terminal:

sudo defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

This tells Time Machine to treat network shares as possible backup locations. Now, when I go to select a disk in the Time Machine preferences, I see my mounted AFP share listed.

Restoring

So that’s how you get the Time Machine backup working, but what about restoring. Most people don’t test the restore functionality but it’s the most important thing you can do. To restore a Time Machine backup over an AFP connection,  first boot off the Snow Leopard install DVD. Then, Launch Terminal by clicking on the Utilities menu. In the terminal window, type the following commands.

mkdir /Volumes/TimeMachine
mount -t afp afp://user:password@afpserver.local/ShareName /Volumes/TimeMachine

This will mount your AFP share and make it available to restore from. Quit Terminal and then run “Restore from Backup” from the Utilities menu. You will see your backup listed and you should now be able to restore from it.

Time Machine is a very nice utility and if you aren’t using it, you should be. I even have other Xserves backing themselves up to this share using Time Machine. Sure, there are third-party applications out there can do so much more, but I’m for just getting the job done. Integration with the OS is also important to me. It’s the main reasons I use Safari as my main browser. As with all backup solutions though, you need to test the restore functionality once in a while. If anything, you might sleep better at night knowing your data is not only safe but recoverable.

I’ve spent most of my career working in IT Operations, a good part of which I’ve spent thinking, “Really, what’s the worst that could happen?” A year or so ago, I asked myself, “What’s the worst that could happen if my MacBook died?” It was a pretty sobering question.

I work full time. I also freelance, go to school, and write fiction part time. The best case would be the failure was during a rare moment of idleness, and I could suffer the loss of a computer without breaking a sweat. But what’s the fun in that? Data disasters don’t strike in moments like this; instead, like a formulaic movie plot, they happen when you’re not only on deadline, but one you’re really late on. Planning for a system failure I pray never happens has led to what’s admittedly an overly cautious backup strategy. Most people think they’re being very cautious if they’ve got a secondary backup method; I’ve got a tertiary backup.

My primary backup is Time Machine, and it has served me well through the usual accidental data deletions. While the interface drives me a little batty, Time Machine is an excellent backup method. Hourly, I’ll hear my drives spin up and can smile knowing the drivel I’m writing is safely backed up. Every now and then I’ll get the dreaded Time Machine backup error, but either forcing the backup or just waiting for the next cycle works fine.

Time Machine, though, only works when I’m attached to my USB devices at home. I use my laptop at work and at school, so if I need to do a restore when I’m not at home, Time Machine is useless. Not only that, if my house burns down, I’m out of luck. As a secondary backup, I use Mozy. Now, the first backup is extremely long; depending on how many gigs you’re backing up, you could be looking at a week’s worth of time uploading data. Once that’s done, subsequent backups are very speedy. It only backs up changed files, so you’re not uploading hundreds of gigs of files every day. It’s easy to configure your backup sets — you can either tell it to grab your Documents, Pictures, Music folders, etc., or you can go deeper and tell it to backup (or exclude) specific folders. Mozy also runs in the background when your Mac is in an idle period.

My secondary computer is a PC. Each of these backup schemes work as long as my Mac is intact or I have another Mac to restore to. Time Machine obviously is Mac-only, but while Mozy works on Macs and PCs, the file that’s restored is a .dmg file. While I could find a way to break into the .dmg file, part of my worst-case plan is, “OK, my Mac is dead and the only way I can make this deadline is to keep working on my PC, STAT!” There are three folders (School, Freelance, Writing) that I have deemed Crucial National Assets. Without immediate access to those folders during a State of Emergency, I am completely and totally hosed.

To solve that worse-case scenario, I use Dropbox. Dropbox simply uploads what I want to a web page, where I can grab files from any other computer, Mac or PC. The one drawback is it likes its files to reside in a Dropbox folder on my Mac, but I got around that by creating symbolic links to those three folders I really care about. Dropbox grabs their contents and uploads them.

An important part of any backup routine is testing data validity. Periodically, I’ll do test restores from Time Machine and Mozy, and verify from my PC that I can access the data on Dropbox. While you’re likely to only need them in case of emergency, it’s important to know if you have to break the glass and use the tools they’ve been doing their jobs all along.

What is your backup strategy?

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I was recently introduced to the Drobo box. If you’re not familiar with it, simply put, it’s the ultimate home backup server.

For $400, you get a BeyondRAID array that can support up to 4 simultaneous drives, and caps at 16TB. Even cooler is the ability to swap out your drives with a single push of a button. Drobo will backup your files across each drive, so if one fails, your files are still safely stored on the others.

Backing Up

Drobo makes it apparent how easily it integrates with Time Machine right from the start. You can set the limit to how much Time Machine will backup on your Drobo drives, and with FireWire 800, or via your network, it’s hassle free backup just like Time Capsule.

iTunes Streaming

To add a little envy to the product, DroboApps features an iTunes Media extension that allows you to share your iTunes library across your network. Keep in mind it costs extra for the FireWire and Network support as it’s a separate attachment. So not only will it back up your data, but now it can stream your iTunes content to your Apple TV or computers across your network.

The Competition

Drobo may offer redundancy and media sharing,  but let’s look at some other viable options. Correct me if I’m wrong, but if you were to hook up a secondary drive to your Apple Time Capsule as a NAS drive, wouldn’t it be the same thing? One drive for back up, and one for sharing media across your network?

I question Drobo, only because from the people I know who have experienced it, and based on Drobo’s Amazon customer reviews, the device doesn’t seem 100 percent reliable. However their customer service record looks to make up for it.

Also considering other alternatives, such as HP’s Media Smart Server, I’m left wondering which is the most effective, but ultimately cost effective device for my home. I guess it really comes down to what matters most to you. If you’ve had experience with any or all of these devices, please share in the comments.

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Backing up your computer is an essential task that many of us neglect until something goes horribly wrong. With OS X Leopard, Apple has made it much easier to ensure that your data is always backed up and protected through a feature called Time Machine.

Time Machine is an application that automatically synchronizes your computer hard drive with another storage device every hour. Reverting to an older version of a file is simple, facilitated through an interesting ‘space-like’ interface.

This article will provide an introduction to Time Machine, explain how best to set your computer up, and the process of restoring a backup if you accidentally delete data or suffer a hard drive failure.

What You’ll Need

There are two main requirements for using Time Machine. First is a copy of OS X Leopard — older versions of the operation system don’t include the backup software. Second is an external hard drive.

I’d generally recommend buying the largest hard drive you can afford. The more capacity, the more room there is to store older files (and the further back in time you can go to restore a file). At the minimum, the drive should be bigger than the internal drive in your Mac.

Apple does offer a dedicated router/hard drive combination called Time Capsule, coming in either 500GB or 1TB varieties. If you’d like a all-in-one network router and backup drive, it’s a great option — if you plan on using it solely as a hard drive, it does work out expensively.

Setting Up Time Machine

The quickest way to get started with setting up Time Machine is simply to plug in your new hard drive. OS X will recognize that you haven’t used the drive before, and ask whether you’d like it to function as a Time Machine backup. Alternatively, head into System Preferences, select Time Machine, and choose your new hard drive from the list of options that appear.

Once set up, Time Machine will begin to back up your drive for the first time. The initial process will copy every single file from your computer’s hard drive to your backup drive. This could involve copying many thousands of files, and will likely take a couple of hours. Be patient, and choose a time when you won’t need to unplug your laptop or power down the machine.

The speed will also depend upon how the hard drive you are using is connected. If plugged in directly via USB (as most will be), the process will be relatively quick. If you’re using a Time Capsule or other networked hard drive you may need to be prepared for a slightly longer wait.

After the initial process Time Machine will only copy files that have been added or changed in the past hour, making future backups far quicker. You’ll find that the following backups are kept:

• Hourly backups for the past 24 hours
• Daily backups for the past month
• Weekly backups until your backup hard drive is full

Changing Options

There are very few options to tinker with when setting up Time Machine, but those that do exist are worth noting.

Firstly, you are able to specify a number of files or folders which you’d like Time Machine to refrain from backing up. This isn’t usually necessary, but can be handy for large files which you don’t need to keep safe.

In addition, you can tell Time Machine not to back up when your laptop is running on battery power to conserve energy, and specify whether you’d like to receive a warning when older backups are deleted.

Restoring Individual Files

Should you lose a file or accidentally delete it, open the folder which used to contain the file, and launch Time Machine. You’ll be presented with a window similar to the following:

Clicking the arrows to the right of the screen will go forward or backward in time, scanning through the various backup dates. It’s possible to take a closer look at a file through Quick Look, by selecting a file and pressing the Spacebar.

When you’ve found the file to restore, select it and press the ‘Restore’ button in the lower right corner. Time Machine will exit and copy the file back to its original location. If it would involve overwriting an existing file, it will ask you what action you’d like to take. Easy!

Restoring an Entire Backup

If the worst happens and you suffer a hard drive failure (or, on a more optimistic note, buy a new Mac!) you may need to copy everything back across from your Time Machine disk. Again, this is a fairly simple process.

If you’ve purchased a new Mac, you’ll be asked when setting it up whether you would like to ‘Migrate’ from a Time Machine backup — simply agree, and follow the instructions to proceed.

If you are booting from an installation CD (after suffering a hard drive failure), select the ‘Utilities’ option from the menu bar, then “Restore from Time Machine Backup.” You then select the Time Machine drive you wish to restore from and follow the simple instructions. Your Mac should be back up and running in no time!

Other Solutions

If you’d prefer not to use Time Machine, there are a couple of other options available:

• Use a utility to create an entire “clone” of your hard drive onto another on a regular basis, such as SuperDuper!
• Use an online service such as Dropbox or Syncplicity to backup important files and documents to your online storage space

Conclusion

Time Machine provides a simple, ‘set it and forget’ backup solution. You’ll need to spend some money to pick up an external hard drive, but I guarantee it will seem worth it when you accidentally delete a set of family photos, an important business document, or your music collection.

Restoring is simple, and it even makes the process of swapping to a new computer almost seamless. Remember to pay attention to any error messages which may pop up occasionally, and regularly try to restore a file (just to check that your backup is functioning as it should)!

Hopefully you’re now all set up and ready to sit back and relax while your Mac keep itself well protected.

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The Set Up

The first thing you want to do is go to [referral link: I'll explain why you should use a referral link later] mozy.com and get signed up. I know there are a lot of other products out there, but this is one that I have used for both backup and a restore of my files, and it does work. 

When you get to the home page, you will click on MozyHome. MozyPro is an unlimited account for businesses. Sadly, Mozy does not offer the free 2GB on the home page, so you will need to click through to find it. 

Once you do click on MozyHome, you will find the free sign-up about half-way down the page, on the left-hand side. It looks like the picture above, but without the red arrow. Click “Sign Up Now, and I will walk you through the process.

You will come to a screen that looks like the one above. Fill out all the information, and click continue.

This little survey is a bit of an annoyance, but you need to fill it out anyway. Mozy won’t let you continue if you don’t. My personal feelings about this, though, is that if you are getting something for free, it is fine to pay with a little background info so the company knows who is utilizing their service. And, luckily, Mozy has a sense of humor about their request for you to fill out this “soul-sucking” survey.

As I stated above, use a referral link. For each person that you refer that uses the free service, you get an extra 256 MB. The good thing is whoever uses a referral code, regardless of whose code it is, also gets an extra 256 MB. Let’s spread the love, leave your referral codes in the comments so those who sign up can get some extra space.

You need to start using the service for the extra storage space to appear in either account.

Once you click the link in the email address you provided Mozy, you will come to a screen like the one above. Click “Download for Mac” and you will be able to download the desktop client that allows you do the actual backups. You will download a DMG file (disk image file) that you will need to open. 

If you get a warning like the one above, disregard it, and open the file, anyway.

Once it is downloaded and opened, you will need to open the Mozy 1.0.0.0 Installer. Double click that, follow the prompts on-screen, enter your computer password when it prompts you, and Mozy will be installed. As it is installing, you will probably get a pop-up that says, “This package contains a program that determines if the software can be installed. Are you sure you want to continue?” Click “Continue.”

Once it is installed, It will open up the configuration screen. This is where you decide what you will backup. There are two things here that are important: Backup Sets and Files and Folders. Files and Folders will allow you to go through the Finder and select specific files and folders that you want to back up. This option works great if you are fairly organized.

The Backup Sets section will back up all the files of a certain type, or related to a certain program. If you have a million things saved to your desktop, with no rhyme or reason, you can choose to save all your presentations and spreadsheets, and Mozy will search through your folders all over your computer to find the types of files you request.

You can select items from each of these, and you can add different sets to the backup sets window. For example, you could create a set that included all your files for a certain project, and then you just have that box checked. Mozy integrates Spotlight nicely, so you can easily search for files that you have named a certain way. So you can put a BU at the end of each file you create and it will be automatically added to the backup set you created.

When you are ready, select “Save Configuration.” If you have not yet backed up, Mozy will ask you to backup. Depending on how much you have selected to back up, this could take a very long time. I suggest starting the backup just before you go to bed. Mozy says it may take many days to back everything up, but it only took a couple hours on a wireless connection for me to back up my 1.5 GB.

Preferences

One drawback of the Mozy backup system is that it by default backs up your computer whenever you aren’t using it. It is a drawback because it takes a lot of resources to run the backup program, which slows down the rest of what you are doing.
Luckily, you can easily change it.

I suggest you keep all these boxes checked. That way, Mozy can update as it needs to, and you will always know what Mozy is doing if its status is in the menu bar. The menu bar menu looks like the picture below. You can see the Mozy logo at the top. When Mozy is not backing up, it is grey and black. It turns black and orange when it is backing up.

Typically, I leave my computer on at night, and so I backup every morning at two a.m. I turned off the automatic backup because I am often away from my computer for a time, and then I need to get back to something else that is resource-heavy. It was very annoying to wait for five minutes for anything to happen. Besides, my computer doesn’t crash very often, so I don’t need backups multiple times a day.

Since I am the only user of my fiber-optic Internet connection at home, I don’t need to throttle my bandwidth usage. You may need to, so it is there. The more it is throttled, the slower the backup could be, so be aware that this could be the case if your backups are taking a long time.

Restoring Your Files

When you lose files, erase your hard drive, or your computer crashes, it is time to restore. To restore your files, you will log in to your Mozy account. There are three options when you choose “Restore Files” from the list on the left of your “My Account” screen. You can choose to restore your files through DVD, Mac Client Restore, or Web Restore. For a processing and shipping fee, Mozy will send your files on a DVD. You can also download straight through the browser for a web restore. We will choose the Mac Client Restore for this walkthrough. This is great for a small number of files.
From the Mozy menu bar icon, you will select “Restore Files…”

For me, this box stays up for a couple minutes before I get anything else.

You can select the backup date that you want to restore your files from. Choose the location and click “Restore” to start downloading those files.

The download process is pretty quick, and didn’t take as long as I thought it would. The files are saved by default to your desktop, but you can put them wherever you want to.

Alternatively, you can download everything using your browser or you can order a DVD.

All in all, this is a very easy program to use. If you need more than the standard 2 GB of backup space, they do have an unlimited option for $4.95 per month for home users. Their business service does not support Macs.

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Time Capsule seems to be Apple’s answer to wirelessly backing up your data with Time Machine. Time Capsule is an Airport Extreme base station with a “server grade” internal hard drive. It looks pretty much identical to the Airport Extreme Apple currently offers.

There will be 2 versions available: 500 GB version at $299 and 1 TB at $499.

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