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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

In addition, I use the MacOS X command-line utility “asr” to make bootable backups (of the main Volume) to FireWire drives, and a incrementally update those using “rsync”. I back up some other smaller machines by rsync-ing their contents to a directory on the mirrored volume.

So far so good, though I’ll probably have to increase the capacity of the mirrored volume in a year or so.

It’s straightforward and fairly flexible. It has incremental backups (so additional backup sets need only be as large as the change from the previous set) All it needs is the ability to resolve Smart Folders (so the file selection can get more nuanced) to be stellar.

Still, I and my girlfriend back up our Home folders to an external drive (once a day, automatically) and the iTunes library that sits on the external drive backs up to the main internal hard drive once a week. Either hard drive can fail and we’ll be fine!

-RS

I have a large music collection (48 gigs) that I also backup to DVD periodically from a smart playlist in addition to the firewire backup. The same goes for my iPhoto library and video files. Less often, I will backup to DVD my important files in the HOME folder and those apps that aren’t apple apps.