My Backup Strategy for Macs

I use Macs at home and at work. Here is my backup strategy:

Level 1 - Hardware RAID

I use a redundant RAID configuration for the hard drives that store the primary copy of the data so that if there is a hardware failure it can continue to operate without any interruption. This doesn't protect you from accidentally deleting something, but it does protect from hard drive failure and ALL HARD DRIVES FAIL.

Level 2 - Time Machine

I use the built in Time Machine backup program from Apple. It's easy and seems to work well. I haven't had to restore much yet so I can't say from personal experience but I've heard that the restore is easy an reliable. I do find that it slows down my computer when its backing up a lot of data and sometimes I use the menu bar icon to cancel the backup if I'm in the middle of something. 

Time Machine is brain dead simple. It literally is like plug in your hard drive and press one button and forget about it.

In addition to being easy and automatic, Time Machine stores many 'snapshots' of your data at different times and makes it easy to browse these snapshots and restore. This does protect you against accidentally deleting something because you can go "back in time" and get the file you deleted.

Time Machine backs up to an external hard drive attached to an iMac at my house. That disk is shared so that all other Macs in the house (and my laptop when its home at night) can backup to the same disk using Time Machine. I'm currently using a 2 TB drive for my Time Machine but I really should upgrade it soon.

Level 3 - JungleDisk

But what if my house burns down? I use JungleDisk from Rackspace to backup all of my local data (and I mean EVERYTHING) up to Amazon's S3 file storage service or Rackspace CloudFiles. This way all of my data is stored securely in the cloud. 

I have over 500GB of data, so it took many months to complete the initial upload. Once that completed, I don't seem to have any problem keeping up with the new data that I bring (mostly through photos and video).

You have to be a geek to set up Jungle Disk because you need a separate account at Amazon S3 or Rackspace Cloudfiles. I would expect that its going to get easier now that Rackspace owns JungleDisk but I haven't tried setting up a new account in years.

Level 4 - Safe Deposit Box

What if my house burns down AND Amazon loses my data? Every six months or so I swap out the hard drives at home with a duplicate set in my safe deposit box. Every year or two I buy new, bigger hard drives, copy the data to the new drives, and put the old drives in the safe deposit box. This is pretty fast and easy. Each year my storage needs grow and hard drives get bigger and cheaper.

How do you backup your computer data? Leave a comment below or talk to me on Twitter here http://twitter.com/joshuabaer

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I spend thousands of dollars per year to insure my home and automobile. I think my data is just as important and worth just as much to protect. My car is replaceable. My data is not.

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[Joshua Baer]

Hi Ryan,

I backup my iPhoto library the same way described above. It's stored on a redundant drive, it gets backed up by Time Machine to a local copy, and then by JungleDisk to the cloud. Neither Time Machine or JungleDisk seem to have the problem you describe with Carbonite. My understanding is that the iPhoto library is stored as a special package that can be treated as a single file or as a bunch of individual files, so it makes sense that some things might not handle it elegantly.

~Josh

[Ryan Heneise]

What do you do about your iPhoto library? I stopped using Carbonite because it (and all the other offsite backups that I'm aware of) treats the iPhoto library as a single file. That means that any time I do anything at all to my photos in iPhoto (even changing a title), it has to completely re-upload my entire 60 gigabyte iPhoto library). Anybody find a good workaround for this?

[Joshua Baer]

I spend thousands of dollars per year to insure my home and automobile. I think my data is just as important and worth just as much to protect. My car is replaceable. My data is not.

[Michael D. Norman]

Ha! You're absolutely right! I meant 2+ TB :)

[Joshua Baer]

Hi Michael,

Thanks for sharing your comments!

Your S3 calculations must be off, because I have 715.6 GB on S3 in September and it cost me $107 in storage fees ($117 total with 70 GB of bandwidth transfer). I think it would cost a few dollars a month to backup your 2GB. Your video and photos are irreplaceable!

It wasn't hard to share the drive across servers. It's either done from the Sharing System Preferences or at the time that you set up a disk to be used for Time Machine. I don't remember exactly but I didn't do anything special I just followed the prompts.

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[Jesse]

My recommendation for most people is Drobo/ReadyNAS + cheap offsite storage ($5/mo). Most people aren't tech savvy enough to setup RAID on their own nor to maintain it. For offsite - IDrive allows you to do networked backups.. Mozy, BackBlaze and a lot of the other big guys don't let you do that. There are a lot of other ones that have popped up recently that might though.

[Arthur Einstein]

My son, Nicholas, pointed me to this post.
Time Machine seems to serve well. I've had to restore once and with the help of the Genius at the Apple store all went well. Recently ran out of space, and rather than upsize the drive I re-partitioned it. Lost the old backups in the process but was willing to do that. I will need to go to a larger back up drive in the future.

Thanks for the strategic look

[Michael D. Norman]

What you've got all seems like a pretty good strategy. We have a server at home for all of our primary data which has RAID 5 for local redundancy. For offsite backup, we do a monthly backup to tape and put it in a safety deposit box. We have 2+ GB of storage currently (video and photos mostly), and a quick calculation would put S3 at $300/month, which is a bit steep, especially as our needs continue to grow. We already had the tape backup system from a previous company (auto-loader which supports 8 LTO-3 tapes), so it works for us for now. I hate dealing with tape, so I've been looking around for an online solution that's not quite as expensive.

For my iMac, I use Time Machine as well, but I can only seem to get it to work against a local drive. I would really like to use a share on my server, and it sounds like you are doing something similar. Did you have to do anything special to get your laptop to recognize the shared drive on your iMac as your Time Machine backup?