Backup Strategy Revisited

[Jack W]

My Hardware: PowerMac G4 933MHz Quicksilver
Software: Tiger OS X.4.7
Applications: SuperDuper! v2.1.3, AppleScript, Toast Titanium V7.

I do a lot of map work, document scanning, OCR, and graphics work, including Digital Camera picture saving, video DVD creation and editing, etc., etc. Therefor, I have a lot of crap (oops, I mean data) on my computer.

Many of you already practice good habits in backing up your computer data and software. Those of you that do need read no further.

Data loss threats in order of severity:

1) Accidentally deleting a file or folder.
2) Having a hard drive become corrupt.
3) Having a hard drive go belly up.
4) Having a fire, hurricane, tornado, flood, or other natural catastrophy.

Hopefully No. 4 will never happen to any of you, as the other consequences can be more dire than the loss of your data. Jan and I have been very fortunate and have never had a fire, except where it belongs – in the fireplace.

Recovery:

1) Recover the file from your backup. You do have one, don’t you?
2) Recover the drive with the right utilities  - Disk Warrior or TT Pro or other if you have them. Re-initialize the drive if you weren’t successful in the attempted recovery. And copy the info back from your backup. You do have a backup, don’t you?
3) Ditto No. 3 after you replace the drive.
4) Sure hope you have DVD backups off-site, or outside your computer room, if the fire is limited to there. My computer room is right over the garage where our car, lawnmower and snow-blower are parked, so I rotate my backup DVDs to a Safe Deposit Box.

HOWEVER, there is a very good likelihood that you will lose a hard drive at some point. It’s not a matter of if, but when.


I have simplified my backup procedures drastically:

You will need Panther x.3.9 or Tiger for this to work.

You will need a second internal hard drive. Partition it with at least two partitions: A system partition and a backup partition.

I also recommend an external Firewire drive in addition.

Use SuperDuper! to clone your boot partition to the second system partition. That way, if your boot disk dies, you can boot from the backup system partition.

Use SD! to create backup sparseimages of your other partitions onto the backup partition. The first pass takes a while, but you can use the smart update feature to update them. It usually takes less than a minute.

Do your smart updates at least a couple of times a week. It's really fast with the smart update feature of SD!

No more excuses.

I have seen internal 300GB Seagate drives for less than $100 recently.

And this week, Best Buy has the external 300GB Seagate Firewire-USB 2 for $180 after instant savings.

If you would like a quick tutorial on using SuperDuper! just PM me.

- Jack

[Parker]

where's time machine when we need it most??

[Gregg]

Always a good idea to backup...

so you can see where you've been!

[Xairbusdriver]

I, only half jokingly, suggested to the Apple rep, that the drive makers must have paid quite a bit to Apple to provide such a potentially disk intensive product. OTOH, he says Apple has determined that only a minority even claims to make backups and their data indicates only 4% actually do so on a regular basis. I fear I'm not in that 4%...
And I have been unable to get SuperDuper! to make a bootable clone on my external FireWire drive.

BTW, he suggested that we start thing in terms of terabite sized drives, 500 Gigs minimum!

[Paddy]

I've been using SuperDuper to back up my main 250GB drive every night automatically for over a year now. I back up to another 250GB internal drive in my G5, and to an external 250GB FW drive. All are bootable. Works like a charm and I have redundancy. Redundancy is so cheap these days that there is simply no excuse not to have it if you have critical data/mission critical work to be done. Even if my G5 were ever to go down, I can simply hook up my FW drive to either my Powerbook or my son's G5 and we're good to go again.

[Mayo]

QUOTE

And I have been unable to get SuperDuper! to make a bootable clone no my external FireWire drive.

What is the problem?  Two reasons I could not create a bootable drive using SD!: the cloned volume name was not exactly the same as the original and I had two Firewire drives daisy-chained.

The curious thing is that in the past I created bootable clones under the same conditions without a hitch. Dave (the SD! developer) theorizes that something new on the cloned volume is Really Fussy about the name of the volume. I have no idea why daisy-chaining the drives is now a No-No...

When I get the the new drive to replace the dead back-up drive I am going to experiment with renaming the cloned volumes and see if they will boot... hopefully something will have changed in the past six months!

[sandbox]

Jim,

QUOTE

In fact, you can use Disk Utility itself to perform a disk clone if you are using Mac OS X 10.4.x. Simply select the "Restore" option, then drag your current Mac OS X startup volume into the appropriate field.

http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?story=20050826082347522

[Xairbusdriver]

QUOTE

I have been unable to get SuperDuper! to make a bootable clone on my external FireWire drive.

Confession time. It seems I was trying to get a partition that didn't have a real OS on it to boot! I already had a bootable OS on another partition on that external!

But your remarks encouraged me to look at SD! closer and I created a "Sandbox" on one of my internal partitions, also. So, SD! is much better than I thought and I may even be better at backing up. All I need to do now is find the reverse button for the drive...