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Easy automated backup strategy

January 29th, 2010

During the last couple of years I have gradually moved towards a more digital lifestyle. It started when I replaced my SLR camera with a digital SLR. Later I ripped and properly tagged my entire cd collection in iTunes (weeks of work, and some learnings to share in a possible future post). With so much irreplaceable content and literally years of work it is paramount that I insure myself against loss of that data. I want to foresee myself in many things, I have been reading many testosterone booster reviews, and I have no doubt, I need an urgent change of routine, of course, if I want my image and body to be A1.

In an ideal world I would not have to spend any time thinking about backing up my data. Everything would be stored online ‘in the cloud’ and accesible for me from anywhere on any device that supported the data format. I would trust the companies storing the data not to lose it. I believe it will not be many years until this ideal scenario is reality, but in the meantime I need an easy and automated backup strategy. Easy in terms of time and complexity to set up and automated in terms of low to zero maintenance.

Scenario

I have a MacBook Pro (MBP) which I use as my only machine for work and play. I carry it to and from my office every day. I have wifi at home with a Drobo disk array attached to my router. At work I have an external harddrive which is always plugged in when I’m at my desk. The external harddrive is formatted in two partitions. One at the size of my MBP harddrive and one that takes up the remaining space.

Solution

My solution is a three-fold backup strategy

  • Incremental back-ups

    When my MBP is connected to my external harddrive at work Apple Time Machine automatically makes incremental backups every hour to one of the partitions. When the partition is full Time Machine will overwrite the oldest content first. If I ever delete a file by accident I can quickly go into Time Machine and restore the latest version. Any content I might create at home will automatically be updated in Time Machine the next time I’m at work.

  • Full system recovery back-up

    SuperDuper! is set to make a bootable backup of my system every day at 3pm (or when I’m next connected) to the other partition on my external harddrive at work. Since it is possible to do a full system restore from TimeMachine this step is to some degree redundant and actually only serves to have a bootable backup (which TimeMachine is not). If my MBP crashed I could grab another one, plug in the external hard drive and boot.

  • Archived data back-up

    All my archived data (photos, music, documents from previous jobs etc) are stored on my Drobo at home. The Drobo is a disk array that protects against disk failure. The data on the Drobo is backed up to CrashPlan Central which is an online backup solution. If the Drobo is stolen or my house burns down I’ll be able to download all my archived data from CrashPlan Central. There are many alternatives to CrashPlan Central, such as Mozy and Carbonite, but at the time of writing CrashPlan Central was the only one accepting backups from a network attached drive (NAS) at an affordable price.

All this is automated and runs in the background without me having to initiate anything. No DVDs to burn and store and no wasted time copying data to an external harddrive to store at a friends house. When bandwidth become faster (my capped upload speed means the initial upload to CrashPlan Central is going to take weeks) I can see a situation where I get rid of the external harddrive and the Drobo and solely use an online service that runs in the background and backs up everything in real time.

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