The Consultants Backup Strategy

As an Apple Consultant, one of the most important parts of my job is to make sure data is safe and secure. After years of my own data loss, files deleted, and computer crashes I now take my own advice. When I setup clients computers, and servers I always discuss backup with them. There are so many different strategies and customizations involving backup, depending on the scale that’s needed.

This multi-part blog post will discuss personal backups, office computer backups, server backups and hopefully everything in between.

Day 1. Personal backups.

Personal backup – For personal backups, as with large scale backups there are 2 parts to it. The main one is backing up locally. This means having a hard drive physically connected to your computer and backing up to it. This allows for quick recovery. If you lose a file, or your whole hard drive dies this is a great way to bounce back with minimal down time. What’s really nice about this is that since 10.5 Apple has provided a free program built into the OS called Time Machine. Once you plug a hard drive into your system, a pop-up shows up asking if you would like to use that drive as your backup drive. There are other software choices, such as Retrospect, and Super Duper. Retrospect, like Time Machine, will do incremental backups whereas Super Duper will clone your hard drive to another drive when run or scheduled. The problem with Retrospect is that the new version for the Mac is cumbersome and hard to use. The problem with Super Duper is that it only keeps one full backup as it just clones your drive. Time Machine runs in the background every hour – so it’s got that “set it and forget it” feel to it.

Tips for finding a good Hard Drive:
1) Try to find a drive that is 2x the size of your internal drive. The way Time Machine backs up it will create multiple copies of your data, so that way you can go “back in time” and retrieve a different version of a file.
2) Check what kind of ports on are on the drive. Most modern Macs come with both USB and Firewire ports. While drives with just USB are cheaper, they are slower than using a drive that has FireWire 800 on it. USB can transfer data at 480 megabits per second at best (it’s a burst-able speed, so it’s varies between 0 and 480). Firewire 800 can sustain a transfer rate of 800 megabits per second. Clearly you want the faster of the two. If you have a MacPro with an eSata card, look for a drive with eSata. eSata drives can be as fast a 3 gigabits per second (there are 1024 megabits in 1 gigabit, so eSata is 3072megabits).

Secondary to local backup is an online service, like Virtua Computers Offsite Backup, or Mozy, or Carbonite. Each of these services has different costs for different services, but in the end the result is the same. Your data is safe in another physical location. The main reason for this is continuity. If there was a fire in your home or apartment, and your computer caught on fire, most likely so would the hard drive that’s right next to it. Having your data off site is a great way to store the most important items to avoid loss in such an emergency. Each of the suggested companies have different price points for different service levels. Mozy offers a free subscription limited to 2GB of data, and then offers paid subscriptions from there. Carbonite offers unlimited backup for about $55/year. Both of these are larger companies handle terabytes of data a day. If you need a more personal touch, you can try out Virtua Computers Offsite Backup (disclaimer: I own the company). Virtua Computers offer a competitively priced product but it’s designed to backup specific files (such as your documents and pictures), not be an unlimited back up like Mozy and Carbonite.

If you happen to own a desktop and a laptop, you can replace the online service backup with something like a cloud service, i.e. Dropbox or MobileMe which will provide not only backup but data synchronization. Now while this isn’t a traditional backup, certain cloud services, like Dropbox actually keep the multiple copies of files in the cloud for quick retrieval. The benefit of this kind of service is that you can have data that synchronizes between the multiple machine. Dropbox and MobileMe also work with the iPhone and iPad. Dropbox, unlike MobileMe, will allow you to access documents, and pdfs. If you have an iPad with the Pages app you can edit those files and put them back into your Dropbox so they will be updated on your computers. Dropbox is free for the first 2GB, and then $10/month for 50GB or $20/month for 100GB. MobileMe is $99/year and gets you 20GB of cloud space, but also syncing of contacts, calendar and mail amongst all of your Apple devices.

Got all that? Backup your data. Data recovery services can cost upwards of $3,000!!! Compare that to a $150 hard drive, or a $10/month service.

If you have any questions feel free to post them in the comments box below.

I will return on friday with your how to backup your office computer.