<p>I’ve been doing static backups on my MacBook Pro for a few years doing a backup every four months. In the past, I stored a lot of things on the cloud but I’ve been moving stuff off the cloud and back onto my laptop because I’m concerned with privacy and availability (especially after the recent Amazon Cloud outage). So last week I ordered a 2 TB WD Elements external drive ($99 at Newegg) and it arrived today and I started Time Machine and it is doing a full backup right now. It will probably take a few hours for the full backup and then will do incremental backups.</p>
<p>So now I don’t have to worry as much about losing data.</p>
<p>Backups are an area which is pretty easy to ignore and the main time when you think about it is when you have a catastrophe or when someone you know has one. No time like the present to put a backup strategy in place if you haven’t already done so. External drives and online backup services are so cheap that it makes it relatively painless in the wallet. I keep sensitive stuff on my system and would rather keep my backups local.</p>
<p>I’ve always assumed by backup strategy is adequate for me, but I may be missing something and would love your feedback.</p>
<p>I have a MacBook with bootcamp and do a lot of stuff on Windows, so need two backup strategies.</p>
<p>I backup key things on my MacSide on MobileMe daily (Quicken, websites I do for a couple of non-profits), photos. I used to do it on my external hard drive - do you think I should return to that?</p>
<p>On my Windows side, I back up weekly to that same external hard drive. I back up my Outlook (which has tons of stuff that is important - contacts, saved emails with real information etc., tasks and calendar which I “live by”), plus My Documents and that’s about it. I also have the Outlook tasks, calendar and contacts on my Blackberry which I sync regularly, so I figure one or the other will be there for me if either the computer or the device crash.</p>
<p>BTW, I’ve never actually had to use the backed up Outlook stuff and just take it on faith that Backup files generated by the procedure I was told to use… will actually work when I need them.</p>
<p>I had a huge hard drive failure and tried to use the backup I had been doing regularly. The new installed HD could not access the backups. Fortunately I still had the failed HD and the info could be pulled from it before it was toast. But it cost me a couple hundred dollars. Really ticked me off. Computer was only 4 months old and I used the backup that came with it. Tech folks told me to get a different back up program, Cobian backup. Haven’t installed it yet but plan to .</p>
<p>I just started using CrashPlan, which is a cloud based server. </p>
<p>I have used Mozy in the past. I have also used hard drives, but this doesn’t work if you keep them in the same location as the computer. You should have multiple locations - a bank vault, a friend’s house, whatever. Multiple points of redundancy would probably be best in terms of making sure the data is there when you need it - your house burns down, someone breaks in and gets your computer and backup drives.</p>
<p>It sounds like you have your bases covered but I personally have the issue with storing financial data on the cloud unless there would be no problems with all of the information being made public. There have been at least two incidents (my recollection) of Google Admins getting fired for reading users’ emails (not in their official duties). If you’re using the cloud, your stuff is on a machine that isn’t yours and admins have to have the ability to deal with outages and other problems so they have access to your files. If they are encrypted, then it may not be an issue.</p>
<p>My main concern is how fast it would take to be back up and running should I completely lose my laptop. If I did lose it, I would take our spare MacBook Pro or buy a new one, restore from Time Machine for the Mac partition and then use WinClone to restore the Windows partition which could be several months out of date. The main thing that I have on the Windows partition is our personal tax return software and data. I have all of the information on paper but it’s nice to be able to look at it on my laptop. I now have a Windows VM on the Mac partition and will do my taxes in the VM in the future.</p>
<p>With Mac OS X, you can just move the files to get back up and running. Windows is pickier and may require the reauthentication of your Windows license. If you are using an OEM license (most people use these as these are half the price of retail licenses), then you have to contact Microsoft to get a new license key. They are not necessarily required to grant you the new license key though most people that I talk to are able to get theirs processed. This is not an issue on retail licenses.</p>
<p>So I guess the question is how you would recover from a total loss? Some might be able to live without their data for a week if they needed to get repairs. I would have a hard time with this as I have a lot of work product information on my laptop.</p>
<p>Another idea - buy 2 external drives and alternate which one you back up to and store the other one offsite at a relative’s house or somewhere else you trust. Also make sure you store the files in a way you can retrieve them without the specific backup program/laptop - i.e. that you could restore by simply copying the files if need be.</p>
<p>This way when someone breaks in and steals all of your computer equipment or if it’s all destroyed in a fire you can still recover the files.</p>
<p>Onsite backup will always have exposures so there should (also) be a backup offsite - either as I illustrated above or to some ‘cloud’ service (but I understand the security and availability concerns).</p>
<p>My takeaway is that I will get a second hard drive to keep offsite - and alternate between the two. Nice idea.</p>
<p>
I’m not totally sure if I understand this. My Word, Excel etc. files… I figure no problem. But my Outlook folders, I guess I would need to have Outlook on whatever machine I was trying to restore them to? </p>
<p>And, in my case, the Quicken data being in the cloud is not a big deal, as I only enter my business income and expense information, without account numbers, for Schedule C purposes… not our family’s entire financial picture. So if anyone else wants to see what I spent on advertising, tolls, continuing education etc… let them have at it, lol.</p>
<p>ETA - and BunsenBurner’s suggestion of where to keep the 2nd hard drive is a good one. That’s where I’ll put it.</p>
<p>I guess I’m going to leave the backup drive in the office. I guess there isn’t a reason why I need to have it at home. I still have my static backups at home for now.</p>
<p>Ignorant question - what is a “static” backup? Is that like what I do - get out the cable and hard drive weekly and plug it into my MacBook and move the files over?</p>
<p>The simplest way is to simply copy the files you want to backup to a different drive (either local or elsewhere). You can do this without any special software by just using Windows Explorer, a command line, whatever a Mac uses, or however else you simply copy a file from one place to the other.</p>
<p>The more complex way is to use a program that keeps track of what it’s already backup up and when it does a subsequent backup, only backs up files that have changed. </p>
<p>An even more complex way to backup is for the program to store the backups in some proprietary way such that without the program you have no way to recover the files easily.</p>
<p>Using the more complex program method can be more complete, more convenient, and faster. The downside is what to do when the ‘restore’ doesn’t work for some reason or you no longer have the program, or there are complications like the computer was stolen so you get a new one with a different operating system, different programs, and different file locations, etc.</p>
<p>Using the simple method makes it easy to just copy your backed up files to wherever you want and you’ll know how to do this because you can save them how you want them - for example all of your Word files in a folder on the backup drive named ‘Word’ or something.</p>
<p>You can save your Outlook files as a PST file. In the vent you need to use the backups you’ll need to use them on a computer with Outlook of course but if yours was stolen or destroyed, you could get another computer, install Outlook, and copy the PST file over and be in business.</p>
<p>I’ve been faithfully backing up my Outlook files as a PST file every week for years. No clue why I needed to do it that way (but obediently following the orders of my “tech guy”) … like I said, just hoping they’d restore if I ever needed them. Sounds like I have it right and, yes, would need to have Outlook on another computer to get it all back.</p>
<p>I guess I’m living in the slightly dark ages, but I guess I can stay that way for now.</p>
<p>Here’s hoping none of us ever needs to “restore.”</p>
<p>I had a funny issue with Firefox consuming disk i/os and CPU time that I couldn’t diagnose so I flushed my profile and the problem went away. Unfortunately so did all of my saved passwords - it was a calculated thing. So this morning, I went into the Time Machine disk and found the old files and restored them. Interestingly enough, Time Machine required that I enter my password in multiple times to restore the two files. Perhaps there is some security mechanism to prevent unauthorized access of the backup disk?</p>
<p>It would have been an inconvenience to reenter all of my passwords again so it was nice to not have to do that.</p>
<p>It doesn’t work for MAC but my D and I use buddybackup. It is an encrypted system that only backs up new files between 2 or more computers live via the internet. It has worked great and has been a big help when my D get nailed with a really bad virus. Since her back up files are both my computer at home and one of friends at college she was able to get on her friends computer, pulled down the files she needed and use the schools computer to complete the assignment. I back my files up to my daughters computer and to my work computer so that way I always have the ability to get the files. The nice is that they can be loaded over the internet as well so you do not need to physically be there.</p>
<p>We had to replace our ailing desktop last month, and we were lucky that Best Buy was able to salvage files from the old hard drive. (Office Depot did a free analysis and said our only choice was to wipe out the drive and start again. We opted for new computer due to old age, fan problems etc). We did have backup to Seagate external drive, but it turned out to be old and incomplete.</p>
<p>This weekend I finally got an external hard drive (Passport). Still contemplating method. I assume there is software that comes with it. Any advise?</p>
<p>We use Sugar Synch. It records and saves all the data all the time on our 3 PCs and 1 Mac (home and work computers), we can access those files from anywhere (including our iphones or files from one computer onto another), and we never have to think about backing up. It just happens. </p>
<p>I really really love it. We pay about $15/mth for the service. It’s really easy to set up and use (but can take awhile to get all the files transferred, depending on size and speed of connection).</p>
<p>I back up my stuff by manually copy data directories on 2 external HDs. I also save important documents on DVDs. I don’t use Microsoft or third party backup software because I am not sure I can always recover. I periodically put DVDs in my bank safe deposit box.</p>
<p>^You probably have way more important stuff to save than I do! We do burn our photos to DVDs because those are irreplaceable but fortunately almost everything else I do on my computers is relatively replaceable (even original writing, I can always find a spare copy and rebuild I figure).</p>
We pay $10 a year for a (bigger) bank deposit box where we store one of the external drives.</p>