The way I do backups

For those of you that know me, you already know that I am huge on data protection. I always backup. I have to admit, there has been times where I have been better at it than others, but suffice it to say, I have always had backups. During the last 10 years, I have used several methods that came and went (out the door) to perform my backups. Some of these included complex solutions with a tape library, Veritas (Symantec) NetBackup, or a korn shell rsync script to an offline disk. These all seemed to work for me, but never had the user friendly interface I really wanted in case someone else, other than myself had to recover a lost file.

I am really pleased with Apple’s Time Machine in Leopard. Time Machine offers a very friendly, easy to use interface to recover your lost data. That is why I like it.

HOW TIME MACHINE WORKS

I am very particular about what I backup, where, when and how long I want to keep it. By default, Time Machine will backup everything, including the Operating System files. The first time you run Time Machine, it performs a full backup to an external disk of all your data including the Operating System, then every hour perform an incremental backup of any file or directory that was modified. It will keep backups every day for a week, then keeps a weekly backups for a month and then continue backing up until your external disk is full. Since there are a lot of logs files, and other directories that are modified all the time at the Operating System level, I feel that it is not necessary to have Time Machine back these files up. I limit Time Machine to only backup the users home directory, basically their data only. This frees up a lot of disk space on the external drive and in time, saves money.

MY SETUP

As for the Operating System, I take a different approach. I have a Mac Mini that has two 1 TB Western Digital MyBook External Hard Drives connected via FireWire. I loaded the Mac Mini with Leopard Server, all the applications and patched it. I then connected one of the external 1TB drives and partitioned it into two GUID partitions, a 60GB and a 940 GB (roughly). Once the Mac Mini was set up the way I wanted it, (Apps, Apple Patches, etc) I cloned the Mac Mini to the 60 GB partition on the External Drive using the asr command in a Terminal Window and made it bootable. (/usr/sbin/asr –source / –target /Volumes/device –erase). I wanted to make sure that I was able to boot up off this drive, so I did so by shutting the computer completely down, powering it up while holding the option key and then selecting the external drive to boot from. Works like a champ, as expected. The idea is to have a perfect snapshot of the Mac Mini with the OS, patches and Applications. At anytime, I can literally take that external drive, hook it up to any Intel Mac and boot from it. This is great planning for upgrades and disaster recovery in the future. The other partition on that drive is for Time Machine Backups, which again is only backing up user data.

The other 1TB drive I have is used for user data only which obviously, goes with out saying gets backed up with Time Machine to the other external drive. Just to clarify, by default, the Mac will point the users home directory to the /Users folder. I point the users home directory to a folder called ‘Home’ on the external drive. In Leopard, it is easy to specify an alternate location. Simply go to System Preferences –> User Accounts and right click on the username and select ‘Advanced Options’. In there you can specify the path to the users home directory.

From time to time, I will be working with a file or directory I do not want to have backed up, such a big Movie files I am rendering or images I am working with in Photoshop. A good workaround I found is that I created a folder called Scratch. I exclude this folder in the Time Machine preferences as well as:

The System Files and Directories.
The users downloads folder
The Parallels Image
Microsoft Users Folder that contains my Entourage DB
Applications Directory
The users Trash Can

IN SUMMARY

I know it may seem like it may take a lot of work to get set up at first, and it does take some time, especially when initially building your system, creating the clone image and then selecting what you want to exclude from your backups. However, its really not that bad. In fact, its much easier than it may seem, just takes some time. What ever your method is to backup, I recommend the following:

Keep it simple, know where your data is being backup, when and what is being excluded.
Use the same hardware. I use the same drives for data and backups. Keep things simple to manage.
Think of the end in mind. If you had to perform a complete restore of all your data, think of what will you need, or wish you did, then work backwards.

Regardless of your methodology of backing up, at least backup. You will not believe how may times friends and family have called me in my life in panic because their computer crashed and they lost all their data. They hope for a miracle that somehow it can be recovered. Sometimes it works, a lot of the time it does not.

There is a lot of free stuff out there if you search on Google as well.

I hope this helps.