We talk a lot about the importance of backup, but we don’t always go into detail about how we back up. I will make an effort of detailing most of what I do. I make the conditional statement of “most of” because I dabble and experiment a lot and frequently forget about that cloud service that I signed up for, or this thing I did on some hard drive I tucked away a while back.
I’ve got a few core philosophies in relation to backup, the most influential being a fascination that keeps me trying new things and willing to spend a lot of time with some frustrating thing that I don’t really understand, and if I don’t learn anything and don’t make any progress, I’ve got a humbling story that helps keep me on even terms with all my non-obsessive/techie friends.
Another philosophy is one that I learned the hard way, many times, and have also learned again and again the way of the wise man – through the misfortune/loss of others – is that you can’t get it back when it’s too late. Backups are important. Backups are as important as your stuff is. If you can’t afford to lose your stuff, you can’t afford to not do a backup.
How much time and money and effort are worth investing into your backup? How much is your stuff worth? How much money did you spend on all your music, software, having some computer professional help you get it all set up? I know that days or weeks is probably a very conservative guess, and a few hundred bucks is probably well below the value of all your data if you’ve been using a computer for a few years. I probably spend a couple hours a month just sorting through all my files, trying to get them organized; a good backup preserves that organization and effort that I really don’t want to do again. My point is, spending some money and a fews hours learning how to backup and make it work for you is time well spent.
Another thing I can’t be clear enough on, is that nothing is 100% reliable. Everything fails, everything breaks, everything is subject to disaster. Having your data in a well diversified set of mediums that are all over the place geographically helps reduce risk. Computers fail and backups fail too. Put your important data somewhere else that you know you can get. Doesn’t matter how high tech it is or how good others say it is if you can’t understand it. What’s important with any backup is that you can get back to what you care about. If this means printing out your favorite digital pictures so you have a copy of them if your computer crashes, you still have that photo and can hold onto the memory. Same goes for a piece of writing. I’m not suggesting you print off tens of thousands of pages of every email you’ve ever gotten, but it might not be a bad idea if it’s some really important document that you’ve been pouring your heart and soul into for ages.
Now that I’ve made an effort to justify the following madness, I’ll get on with the actual methods…
The easiest and most recommended and cheapest backup method is to copy everything to a thumb drive / flash key / USB stick, USB drive (whatever you call it); one of those things you plug in to your computer and put stuff onto. CDs and DVDs are options, but they’re generally permanent, and are kinda slow compared to the USB drives, there’s also a more formal process where you need to finalize the contents before the disc starts to burn. If you’re moving the most critical stuff (generally some documents, maybe a few spreadsheets, and some photos and other digital keep sakes) it’s probably only a few gigabytes (GB) and might easily fit on these mediums. If you’ve got a lot digital photos they might not all fit into a USB drive with only a few GB, you can try this with many different USB drives, but it’s going to take a while, I’ve done it and there are easier ways. Putting the same stuff onto more than one USB drive isn’t a bad idea though.
The next easiest method is use an external HDD in the same way you would with a USB drive. Just click and drag and your files will be on this secondary storage device you’ve got plugged into your machine. You can keep everything organized with folders, just like on your Mac.
You can use also use an external HDD for a Time Machine backup. Time Machine is a program written by Apple that’s included in every version of Mac OS X from 10.5 Leopard, released in 2007. Time Machine copies every file on your computer to an external HDD, and makes different snapshots. It only copies the changes. Because of the redundancy of files, we recommend that a drive being used for a Time Machine backup is twice the capacity of the drive it’s backing up. If your Mac has a 1TB drive we recommend a 2TB HDD. It’s not a requirement, but it’ll give you that much longer before the drive fills up and starts deleting old backups to make space for the new.
Apple makes a device called the Time Capsule for use with their Time Machine backup software. The device is a wireless base station / router, the AirPort Extreme, with a hard drive built into it. If you already have a router that’s working perfectly, this might be a great, but expensive solution. I personally really like the Time Capsule, because it automatically backs up my MacBook if I’m using the wireless at home. Because that’s pretty much a given, I know I have an up to date backup.
There is even more that I do for my personal data, but I’ve set up both of my sisters with all of the above and regularly check to make sure they’re up to date, and I’m confident that this is a solid backup strategy for them.