Comments on: User Feedback: What’s Your Backup Strategy?

By: NewSushi

NewSushi — Tue, 04 Oct 2005 16:05:52 +0000

I became very interested in the subject of backup strategies after a catastrophic hard drive failure in my Powerbook G4 a couple of weeks ago. Until then, I never even really thought about backing up my stuff.

Since then, I’ve tested several applications (Synk, iBackup, and SuperDuper!) finally settling on SuperDuper! for its interface, developer support, and ability to perform the tasks that I want it to do.

I backed up all files to my external LaCie HD last night. There was only one hitch right at the beginning that was fixed with a quick trip to the FAQ on the developer’s site. After the backup finished I rebooted from the FW drive and everything was fine.

For the time being, I plan to do weekly smart updates to the external drive. Ultimately, though, I plan to get a second external drive and keep it offsite. That way, I can do daily smart updates to the one onsite and trade them out weekly. That way, if worse comes to worse, I’m never more than a week behind.

By: Sime, the backup newbie

Sime, the backup newbie — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 05:51:04 +0000

I recently started using Backup 3, but I’m not sure why!!

I save my most important files to my iDisk so they are available whether I’m at home or at work, and iSync keeps my address book updated.

With almost everything on at least 2 computers (plus the Apple server), do I really need Backup 3?

By: Marcos Kuhns

Marcos Kuhns — Sun, 25 Sep 2005 23:23:54 +0000

I have two internal HDs and use rsync to back up various folders from one HD to the other. I automate backup using anacron (because I don’t always leave my computer on over night) at various intervals: important documents daily, iTunes library ever few days, my Library folder weekly, etc.

I also use an external Firewire HD that I back up more thoroughly to whenever I have the time. Once a month usually. I use rsync for this backup as well.

The scheme seems to work as my 2nd HD crashed a few weeks back & once a replacement drive came in I had all critical information restored within a few hours.

By: Walter Jeffries

Walter Jeffries — Sun, 25 Sep 2005 20:37:28 +0000

Nightly with Deja Vu and monthly with Carbon Copy Cloner. The nightly one goes to my second internal hard drive – gotta love these old PowerBook Pismos. Bummer that the new PowerBooks can’t take a second drive. I virtually never need a CD/DVD drive and would much rather have a second, removable, drive.

This week I bought an iPod 20G for only $90 and am going to start using that as our family nightly backup as well. It is tiny so it can slip into a pocket when I leave the house.

By: John

John — Sun, 25 Sep 2005 18:27:41 +0000

I backup my Powerbook about once per week using an external firewire drive. First I use Onyx to clean out everything except Finder View, run the maintenance crons, then boot single-user in AppleJack and do a deep cleaning and shutdown ( “applejack AUTO shutdown”). I reboot and use opt-cmd-p-r three times to zap the nvram, and finally let it boot to the desktop. I shut down the webserver and databases, and then I use asr at the command line ( “asr -source / -target /Volumes/Backup -erase” ) to clone the drive. Once it’s done I boot from the backup to make sure it works.

About once per month, when the backup is done I boot from it, make sure it works, and then use asr (again at the command line) to clone it back to the original drive, which gives it a good reorg. Then I use Diskwarrior to fix up the directory.

The external firewire drive is partitioned into two volumes, and I alternate volumes with my backups.

For the stuff I do at work, it’s Veritas Netbackup all round, using LTO2 tapes in two StorageTek with 4 drives each. It takes care of 8 San Media Servers and about 60 networked hosts on this system, nightly differentials and weekly fulls, with vault duplicates taken offsite.

By: Charlotte Web

Charlotte Web — Fri, 23 Sep 2005 03:02:17 +0000

AIT-2 tape drive, nightly incrementals, monthly full backups. Use two sets of tapes, keep one offsite in a records storage facility. Trash all the tapes and buy all new ones every year to anticipate data loss due to wear and magnetic media failure.

Retrospect is awesome. A lot of backup programs out there making backing up far more complicated than it needs to be. I’ve used Retrospect on both Mac and Windows servers, and it just works.

On my personal computer, I back up to CD-R’s. I always burn two copies, just to anticipate one failing.

By: Rich Trouton

Rich Trouton — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 20:51:42 +0000

Carbon Copy Cloner is my friend for when I’m making disk-to-disk clones, especially since it does scheduled backups (my work’s essential servers and my home server all have cloned disks that are synced nightly using CCC. Saved my bacon a few times.)

For heavy-duty backups, Retrospect is still the tool I use the most though I’m growing fairly dissatisfied with Dantz’s support.

By: Steve

Steve — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 12:45:03 +0000

I should add that I have had a Retrospect backup set go bad (once), so I was glad that I always keep the previous month’s set around.

By: Steve

Steve — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 12:38:42 +0000

Retrospect backs up 3 Macs nightly to an external FireWire drive. Every month each backup starts with a new backup set, so if anything goes wrong with a backup set, I can still get back data that’s at most 30 days old. (I guess I was confused by the location of the link for the article before.:)

By: Rolf S.

Rolf S. — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 09:53:47 +0000

Hello!
I use Retrospect for incremental backups to cdroms. Once a week my whole iBook, everyday certain folders I keep work in (my thesis, mail, projects, safari, addressbook, notes etc.). I sync my bibliographies-databases through Silverkeeper within folders on my HD and to an external HD (Firewire 400).

I keep a bootable clone of my HD on a partition of that external HD but right now it is still in Panther…

There is some redundancy but it is better than losing data. That setup has saved my life several times (second HD! in my iBook G3 800 Mhz) even before I bought the external drive.

Retrospect is not fully functional under Tiger so I keep an iCal-alarm opening it at the right time and it takes it from there.

I am unsure about iBackup. They donot even tell what format they save file in. What about resurrection ;-) when I might quit .mac in future?