In a recent Tech Tails article I prattled on at length about my backup strategy, but I didn’t mention everything that I do. What I personally do isn’t limited to just having a Time Machine backup on an external HDD that I unplug and leave in a desk drawer most of the time, and another Time Machine backup to a Time Capsule, and some of the more important stuff on a flash drive here and there. After working at Small Dog for a few years and getting scared by the constant horror stories I’m exposed to every day, I’ve come to lose faith in the reliability of my storage devices. Computers fail, or have bad things happen to them (loss, theft, gravity, liquid, etc.) and I’ve seen many permutations of these. While I don’t mean to scare you, I do intend to set realistic expectations that sometimes unfortunate things happen. If your backup drive fails at the same time as your computer fails, or your house gets struck by lightning and it fries your Time Capsule and everything else plugged into the wall, you might find yourself in the same place as having never bothered to do a backup. Other bad things can happen, like local disasters, house fires, giant death ray lasers from some angry alien spaceship that just wipes out an entire neighborhood. So I take a few extra steps.
I rotate between two external HDDs that I do a Time Machine backup to, this is just in case one of those drives fails. Some of them are pretty old, and I’ve had them for a while so they are way outside of their warranty period. They’ve served me well, but they’ve also got all my important stuff on them. Because I know that drive failure is a real possibility I have redundancy (redundant meaning the same thing again) it might seem like a waste, but I’m more concerned about losing all those photos than I am about the 80 bucks or so I spent on that drive.
I have yet another external HDD that I do a bootable backup to. This bootable backup is an exact clone of my boot volume on my Mac. What’s really awesome about a bootable volume is that I can plug in this external HDD before my Mac boots up, press and hold the option key before that gray Apple logo shows up when I power it on, and I can select this drive instead of the one in my machine! I use a couple of utilities for this: SuperDuper! and Carbon Copy Cloner. They’re both great and give me a great deal of flexibility in copying data from one drive to another.
Cloud-based services are another really great way to back up your stuff, but I use them sparingly just like I do with my flash drives. The major limiting factor in cloud based services is the upload speed. It can take a little while to upload bigger files over the internet, but once you get them there, those big cloud services have tremendous reliability, redundancy and convenience. Dropbox is one of the most popular, and most supported, but they’re far from the only option out there. For example, Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive, SpiderOak, and Apple’s very own iCloud, just to name the few that I can think of at the moment.
Redundancy might sound silly at first, but it’s the name of the game when it comes to protecting your data.