Nobody likes a broken record (well, maybe some people do), but if there’s one thing we can’t repeat enough in the tech world, is that you need to keep backups. Good backups. The best way to appreciate the value of backups is to spend some time working at a help desk. When I worked at the help desk in college, the only thing more guaranteed than full computer labs during finals was people asking to help recover files. Sometimes I could get the files back, but sometimes they were gone for good. The best way to prevent that scenario is with a good backup system.
There are lots of options for backing up, and depending on your needs, some options are better than others. During my final year in college, I became so paranoid about losing critical files I backed up to manual .tar.gz archives on a file server every single night. Fortunately, I never had to dig into those archives, but it gave me peace of mind to know everything was safe. Actually, Apple’s Time Machine backup system came out while I was in college, but I was solidly in penguin-land (Linux) by then, so that wasn’t an option.
Nowadays, I use Time Machine on my MacBook Pro at work. It backs up to a 1TB external drive over firewire. While I’ve only had to use it a few times, and not for anything mission critical, it’s certainly been really great and helpful. At home though, I hadn’t been following my own advice, and was living dangerously without a backup system for a while. Fortunately, nothing ever happened, but I’ve since mended my ways and now use two primary backup systems/methods.
At home, my primary desktop is linux, so I can’t use Time Machine, but I do have a Mac mini I use as a file/web server. This is where my backups usually go. For a while, I used a linux-based backup tool. It was very simple, and I think it was probably based on rsync. It had its share of problems, and I don’t think it ever liked that I forced it to backup over my network to the Mac mini. So when I got tired of its problems recently, I started looking at other solutions and was immediately drawn to Code42’s CrashPlan. This is an amazing backup solution that gives you more options than you can shake a stick at!
First, for free, you can download their client for linux, Windows or OS X. Once you’ve installed it on all the computers you want to back up, it just works. You can tell it to backup one computer to another, or to a folder (like on an external hard drive), or even to a trusted friend’s computer over the internet. I was amazed at how easily this worked, and how easy it was to install.
Once it was installed on my linux desktop, and my mini, they just started talking to each other. No configuration, no nothing. The first backup takes a while, but after that, incremental backups will be much smaller. And if you need more backup space (petabytes?), you can pay as little as $4 a month and backup to CrashPlan’s encrypted cloud. No gimmicks. They seriously let you back up as much as you want for the same price. Obviously the data has to go over the internet, so backing up petabytes there might not be such a good idea, but you can seed your cloud backup by mailing them a drive with all of your data for about $125.
My second backup scheme at home is something I don’t think people consider too often, and that’s archiving. There’s a lot of old data I have that I don’t need on a daily, or even monthly basis, but I want to keep it. There’s a huge debate online about the best archival methods. Many people even advocate for good ol’ magnetic tape, but I choose to backup to extremely high quality Taiyo Yuden DVD+Rs. As far as I know, you can’t buy these DVD+Rs in stores (at least not commonly in the U.S.). They’re pretty expensive, and for best results, you should make sure you’re buying them directly from Japan to ensure you get the real thing.
I’ve had too many cheap DVD+Rs fail on me after a month or two, so for archive-and-forget-it schemes, I highly recommend spending the extra money. Once I archive my data to redundant archive disks, I make sure to keep them in a safe place and about 1-2 times a year, I pull them out and run an integrity check. I have had to dip into my archive disks once or twice, and I was extremely happy to have them.
Hopefully I didn’t sound like too much of a backup broken record here. The point is backups are critical, and if you do a little research, there are solutions out there for pretty much everyone and every situation. If I can backup my linux desktop to my Mac mini, anyone should be able to find a solution that fits their needs.