ISO50

For the Mac, I recommend the donationware Carbon Copy Cloner. It does a block for block bootable copy of your drive (even while logged in) and is absolutely fantastic.

I’m not sure if the cloning can be scheduled, but given the support it has I really would not be surprised one bit if it did.

Hi again Scott,

Wanted to give my two cents on the whole thing.

I’m quite into both RAID and backups and I think your plan is mostly OK but I have the following suggestions:

1. On your backup drive array get another 1TB drive and run another, separate RAID5 configuration. They’re quite inexpensive and it greatly increases your data security and speed. HOWEVER, this would be a trade off in the recoverability of the data (denies the ability of Active@ File Recovery to find files by signature if two of the backup drives fail).

2. Offsite backups are useless if you don’t have a good plan to do it often. My opinion here about physical backups is to take one periodically, then ship it by mail or whatever to a far away friend. Doing this with a hard drive you risk the integrity of the past data (if all data is on that drive) and it’s pretty fragile. Best bet would be to see how much data you use per period between offsite backups and choose a medium that fits that data onto it (my suggestion for most people is to use a couple of memory cards or USB sticks and ship one to and get one from the offsite backup location every time the above period expires). This makes sure you use something which is almost indestructable and also it’s much more convenient for you (send it via regular mail, it’s light, doesn’t hazard past backups).

3. Offsite backups should be incremental AND encrypted. Don’t risk the backups by sending the disk with the data back and forth, just send the modified files and reassemble them at that end. Also, you need to encrypt them, at least until that end (if not keep them encrypted) because friendships may fail in time and things may get lost in time and you don’t want your IP to fall into someone else’s hands.

4. You should really consider online backup. Backblaze has by far the best offer and they just doubled their unlimited quota :D Basically for 5$/month you get unlimited backup capacity. Only real restriction is that it doesn’t cover files over 4gb (due to their file system). And the only issue there is the first backup, after that I can’t imagine it taking too long to sync. Even if you do like 2gb/day and your connection is 1mb/s it’d only take about under an hour to sync all that. First one is the hard one though, eating up a few days, but it’s a hassle I personally feel is worth taking. This basically takes care of your offsite backup problem much cheaper than buying and swapping memory cards with someone but it does pose a small threat if (or better yet when) your internet connection fails.

To sum it all up my suggestion is to use a local backup in another RAID5 (reduces the risk per drive to fail) for immediate backup (and I mean immediate, no late-night daily backup), and then use backblaze to take that backup from the backup array and into the cloud (or directly from the PC) and basically rely on this as a long standing archive of everything.

Another idea that appeals to me but would probably cost a lot would be to just buy a truckload of memory cards and fill them each week, then keep them in a small fireproof waterproof safe. But that wouldn’t really be profitable.

Oh, and do use full drive encryption (is there a truecrypt for Mac?) with your laptop, you never know when it will get stolen…

Cheers,
Adrian

Scott, I use time machine and Super Duper! for my local backup. I use Backblaze for my offsite/online backup. Super Duper is the best and I love backblaze.

I’m on a Mac, I use Carbon Copy Cloner once a week to get a bootable copy of my main drive. That HDD doesn’t live offsite but does live in an awesome everything proof box.

My main drive is also backed up with Time Machine to an 8Tb DroboPro.

I also use a variety of online services to store other critical content, stuff I’m working on, etc. (Dropbox, Springloops & Beanstalk for code, webhost for other files). I feel very secure. Although, maybe I should have 2 HDDs with the Carbon Copy images… *off to computer store*

Services like flickr for images and dropbox, in conjunction with burning dvd’s are what I use for archiving finished works. This is far from ideal from a working file standpoint but they are cheap but I am only a recent grad.

But it is a great system for keeping your working drive as lean as possible. Keep the finished images/pdf’s on your working drive or a drive at hand and then archive everything else.

I hope there was something useful in that.

I just use a combo of Dropbox (50GB plan) + SuperDuper!

Dropbox for project files + music + ebooks and such. SuperDuper! to save an image of my MacBook’s HD. My PC is just a gaming rig so I don’t care about backing up that thing…

I use Time Machine, it’s saved me from a couple of potentially disastrous problems. I do use a few online services to store some of my most important files. But as for backing up everything to an online service, that seems a bit far fetched for the amount of data I have and the puny upload speeds most ISPs provide.

One ides for you however is Amazon S3. They now have a service where you can send them a hard drive, and they will dump it directly onto an Amazon S3 Bucket for you, which would save you a TUN of time for the initial import. They can also do the inverse if you want a copy of all of your files.

I’ve just started trialling http://www.backblaze.com – an off site backup cloud that allows you to also backup external HDs. I’ll drop back in to give you my thoughts in a little while.

I’ve used Silverkeeper from Lacie for quite a long time.
http://www.lacie.com/silverkeeper/index.htm
It is free, does a great job at bootable backups (or regular ones), does incremental backups, and is the fastest solution I’ve tried. I’ve used SuperDuper and Carbon Copy Cloner, and remember them being significantly slower. Once you’ve done your initial backup, subsequent syncs go ultra fast.

As far as data drives, I use a RAID 1+0 with a hot spare. Kind of costly drive wise (5 drives only gives 2x drive size capacity), but great for speed, and up to three of the drives could fail (as long as they did it in a considerate way!).

For my personal laptop, I have just ordered a Time Capsule, and keep old content (photos mostly) on mirrored externals. Not abiding by the offsite rule unfortunately. I like the idea of Backblaze, but am wary of how long it would take to backup initially, and am charged a fair bit by my ISP for anything over 60GB/mo.

I used to swap compact flash cards out of a safety deposit box. Now I just use amazon s3 and manually manage it. Manually doing it is somewhat error prone, but it’s the cheapest and most convenient way for me since I deal with pretty small files.

If I had a ton of data, I’d probably use amazon s3’s data import service that was mentioned earlier.

Amazon S3 is one of the most expensive services so I wouldn’t recommend it.

Backblaze even has a nice illustration of cost per petabyte on their blog.

Also, S3 makes you keep paying a quite hefty sum and they’re a lot more likely to change their pricing out of the blue…

imo just treat the time until you get the initial backup on backblaze as if you were to start say a month later than you actually did :D

the first hurdle is the tough one, then it should go pretty smoothly

I’ve have had some bad luck and close calls in the past, so I am pretty set on backing up my material. I two main drives. One is Time Machine and the other is my own personal backup. I plan on purchasing another third backup, in which could be hidden away in a closet or something in case my apartment was robbed.

I did have couple friends in which their laptops were stolen, but the real punch in the face, was that the external harddrives were stolen as well. These things can become a huge bummer.

I have always thought of online storage but the same situation goes, it is too expensive, and it would take forever to back around 2TB of material.

And thank you to Eydryan for suggesting BackBlaze, I might have to try that.

As for Western Digital, I also heard mixed reviews. Both of my HDs I am using now are WDs. Does anyone recommend a more secure harddrive to use, purchase from the get-go?

But wow, thanks everyone for sharing your tips!

Mozy.com works great for me. I’ve got the premium package with no space limits. I set up the app. 2 years ago and it runs in the background and I never have to worry about it. I check once in a while that everything is going well and I’ve restored data from the once. So far I’ve a very happy customer.

*suddenly feels panicked* *must backup everything now*

After reading this article and all the comments I started to get concerned about my data. For the moment I’m using two external drives that have basically exactly the same files on. I don’t feel very confident with this though. So I started looking around and talking to my dad who is an IT engineer. He told me that he set up a NAS server based on FreeNAS at home where he keeps all his photos and important Data. It’s basically an old computer (I think some AMD 333Mhz, anything faster will certainly do much better) set up as a Sotware RAID1 system.
I have absolutely no idea how fast it is since it is using the Home Ethernet to transfer data. But what I thought was really interesting was that you can actually access it through the web as well if your ethernet is connected to an internet line. Again I suppose the speed through this is not very fast but for it’s perfect. When I’m at school I could simply get my files without walking back home to grab my HD.
You simply have to set up your BackUp Software to store data to the NAS server. It seems fairly simple.
Since I’m a student and my finances are fairly limited I will definitely look into it more seriously.

This article talks about a combination of FreeNAS and RSync, a backup software for Windows. Very geeky but very interesting concept.

http://www.dailycupoftech.com/windows-backup-with-rsync-and-freenas/

First of all a tape system is really not worth it anymore. While their reliability is proven and they’re the most resistant system over time (tapes can last about 100 years) the high cost and existence of alternatives means it’s not a good choice for simple applications. My preferred alternative to tapes are memory cards. Small, easy to use, and the infrastructure is already there. Combine that with being almost indestructible and I think you have good competition for those tapes.

Second, I really enjoyed the comment about the NAS but… it complicates things. The more steps in the backup process the more ways the system can fail. What happens if the computer acting as NAS just decides to stop working? Or has a shortcircuit somewhere? Backup will fail, and let’s see you looking for a 333Mhz AMD motherboard in the middle of the night :D

I think first tier backup should always be simplest, and inside or close to the machine it’s backing up (close as process, like an internal or external drive, or maybe even a dedicated NAS like Drobo). This way if the backup machine fails you can always fix it quickly (get a new drive – always keep one spare on hand – and rebuild the RAID5 or RAID6 usually).

Then you can have second tier on Backblaze which gives you the advantage of being off-site and having web access, as well as peace of mind in the case of theft.

Another neat trick with on-location backup are wireless USB adapters. Stick one in the initial machine and another in the external drive that’s hidden in the wall (don’t forget power) and you have a nice untraceable connection. Just make sure you have some way to either power the wireless usb adapter or a simple way to access it to change batteries every now and then.

Data backup is such a cool topic. We’re such nerds :D

@frank – “so with backblaze you can browse and recover individual files?”

Yep, I recovered on just the other day and it saved my bacon. It allows you to go back through the last seven days of saves also, which I had to to get the version I needed. I was pretty happy with that.

Just read a really fascinating article explaining some of the fallacies of any home backup solution: http://www.c0t0d0s0.org/archives/5906-Thoughts-about-this-DIY-Thumper-and-storage-in-general.html

Main thing that could be applied to a home backup solution is to use a RAID6 configuration with a hot disk inserted (basically an empty disk not in the array but which can take over the second a drive fail is detected).

Anyway read that. Also, why no comments from Scott?

Thanks for this nice post. Really Cool.

As a die-hard Mac-user, SuperDuper always. Never failed me, always works. Have a clone of my main drive, which get updated once every second day. So If I have a drive failure, and have to finish something, I just work from the SuperDuper clone.

For online/offsite backup I use Backblaze. It’s ridiculously cheap, with no space limitations, it’s super-stable, works elegantly in the background, and as opposed to Spideroak (which I used until 3 months ago) the UI is simple, and you can fully saturate your upload bandwidth if you so desire. I have it set up so that it backs up from 2 AM until finished, which is just about right for me. I can get 2 GB up there every night. I also have some of my clients graphic files ( 100 Gb) up there and compared to Amazon S3 prices…it’s a no-brainer.

Only drawback of Backblaze is that it only takes files up to 4 GB. For me though it’s fine, as my graphic files rarely exceeds 1 GB. Also, no DMG’s, but that’s also a small drawback.

The restore options works well. Either zipped download, FedEx’ed DVD, or FedEx’ed harddrive for 100’s of gigabytes.

I don’t really use Time Machine anymore, but still think it’s a great way to do an easy backup.

My next backup-system will be a Caldigit VR raid box, as I’ve only heard good things about their stability, speed, and quality. Prolly buy an E-sata card for that.

Very nice tutorial . I want to try it later on!Thanks!