Backup of Your Backup – Part 1

ByMike Moffit

We often write about the importance of having a current backup. Hard drive failure and software corruption are common in the computer world no matter what platform you’re using. One of my clients recently complained to me that both her computer’s internal hard drive and her external Time Machine backup drive failed. She brought everything to an Apple Store and they asked her if she had a backup of her backup. She was outraged and believed that was a ridiculous question.

While it’s rare for both an internal drive and the backup drive to fail at the same time it’s not unheard of. Having a backup of one’s backup is actually a really smart idea. Many people make second copies of their backups manually using cloning applications like SuperDuper! or Carbon Copy Cloner. Others use software or hardware mirrored RAIDs to continually back up data to multiple drives at once.

One of the things I really love about my Time Capsule is that it has an option built right into the AirPort Utility software to create its own redundant backup (note, it is not a RAID). This weekend I took advantage of the Time Capsule’s “Archive” feature. Between the unusually high heat in Vermont this week and the fact that my 1TB Time Capsule only has 50GBs left (eek!), I thought it was definitely time to make myself a backup of my backup.

Before I left work on Friday, I bought myself a new LaCie 1TB Grand Hard Disk Drive. When I got home, I immediately formatted the drive and hooked it up to my Time Capsule via USB. I popped open ‘AirPort Utility’ (Applications/Utilities), went to ‘Disks’ and hit the ‘Archive’ button. It asked if I’d like to make an Archive on the new LaCie I had plugged into it, I confirmed and off it went!

For anyone who’s curious, it took more than 24 hours for the entire 1TB of data to transfer over USB 2.0. Once it was complete, I honestly felt a bit more comfortable. I ejected the external hard drive, boxed it back up and now it’s safely hidden away in my basement. I have clients who take their archives off-site and/or to a firesafe box; those are both great ideas.

The next most common question is, “How often should I make an archive of my backup?” I plan to make an archive about once a month, unless I’m working on a particularly large project in which case I would archive more often. Most businesses archive once every 1-2 weeks and some home users go as long as three months before archiving. It’s really a matter of personal preference. If most of your life is online and you don’t save much data locally you would probably be OK waiting a month or two between archives. If you create or store many new documents, pictures, music or movies on your internal hard drive then you might want to archive more often. Basically, think of it in a worst-case scenario; if you did find out that both your internal hard drive and primary backup failed, how old a backup would you be comfortable reverting to?

Oh, and for those of you now honestly (or snarkily) wondering if you should have a backup of your backup’s backup? Well, I would never say not to. 😉

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