Best basic strategy for 25-gig backup?

February 6, 2006 6:16 AM

I'm looking for a basic, personal Mac-based backup plan. I've got 25 gigs of data - files and media - on my Mac that I want to keep backed up, every week at least. I've used .Mac's Backup program, but that's too slow for this size of backup (and doesn't seem to have that capacity).

Currently I manage to burn DVDs; but only every few months, since it takes a really long time, and the backup stretches over five or six disks.

Finally, I know the solution a lot of people use is simply to get an external hard drive. My concern there is that it's not holding much of a history - if the hard drive fails, all my backup data is gone. Contrasted to the DVDs - if one DVD fails, I still have the others (and the disks from backups before that).

Should I then get multiple hard drives and rotate between them? Is that what Mac users "in the know" use for their personal backups?

Finally, whatever the solution - is there software that would easily allow me to designate which files/folders should be on each backup, and which shouldn't?

posted by cgt to Computers & Internet (14 answers total)

An external HD should last a reasonably long time if you don't carry it around with you. Depending on how much money you want to spend there are several products which offer redundant networked storage so that you can survive drive failures with no loss of data, they aren't that cheap though. I think 2 small (in size and/or capacity) external USB drives would probably do fine, you could use OS X's built in software RAID 1 support to backup to both drives simultaneously to get redundancy, or you could simply alternate drives periodically.

I use Deja Vu to backup my stuff to an external HD. It's pretty configurable.
posted by public at 6:24 AM on February 6, 2006

I recommend the multiple external hard drive approach. You can get FireWire drives fairly affordably and they are quick and unintrusive for backup. Get two and keep one at work or somewhere off-site, if you can -- this is worst-case-scenario contingency, but you never know. I can't imagine going back to DVD backup -- this is so much easier and faster. I use the .Mac Backup program for my daily "work" backup -- that way you have an emergency resource even if you can't get to your off-site drive until the next day or something. It's very slow but fine for a few documents and my "current" project, usually. I back up my Users directory, figuring I could reinstall OS X and essential applications pretty quickly.

My drive (from OWC) came with Dantz Retrospect Express. It has everything most users would want for this sort of backup, I think. You can specify which folders get backed up, and you can also have multiple backups -- for instance, if you wanted to back up some folders more than others. It's very easy to use. I'm sure there are other FW drives that come with Retrospect Express, too.
posted by theredpen at 6:28 AM on February 6, 2006

- You should back up your entire disk. It makes getting back to normal after a failure much easier, and not doing so runs the rick of not backing up that one file you needed.
- Buy one large (400GB) disk and back up the whole lot to a new folder every time, say once a month. When it's full, put it on a shelf and buy a new one.
- If you're worried about hard drives failing, buy two and alternate between them.
- Use Silver Keeper.
- Read this great article on the topic.
posted by cillit bang at 6:29 AM on February 6, 2006

Lifehacker offers some great advice on the topic, if that topic were backing up a PC. But seriously, they bring up some good points, even if the software they use is certainly Windows-centric.
posted by disillusioned at 6:34 AM on February 6, 2006

rsyncx. or carbon copy cloner. Oh, and an external drive. Get a much bigger one that you think you'll need. I imagine if you've got 25 gigs of things you want to back up, your entire mac is around 40-45 gb. And it'd be great to have a bootable copy of the entire machine. Now think a bit into the future... So get a 300 or 400 GB drive. You'll thank me later.

The real problem is that it'd be nice to have *multiple* backup copies of you data, that you keep in different places. I take my external HD home every month and copy the disk image to an imac, just to be sure. I also keep a copy of my most recent work on my iPod. This is a weekly. I am not a "chron job" (way to schedule events) running back-up crazy. But hey, those 0s and 1s are important to me.
posted by zpousman at 6:57 AM on February 6, 2006

I back up just my home folder daily to an external hard drive using Silver Keeper. I've also used Deja Vu, but last I checked, I found Silver Keeper is a little more configurable (lets me exclude cache directories and the like)--and it's free. I don't bother to copy applications or anything else—my reasoning is that if I have an internal hard-drive failure, it'll be a good excuse to re-install from scratch and make sure everything is up-to-date.

Once in a while (no regular schedule, but perhaps 2x/year) I burn a DVD with the really irreplaceable contents of my home folder.

Hard-drive backup is pretty safe. The odds that your internal and external would both fail in a one-day period are exceedingly slight. If you're really concerned, you can set up a RAID level 1 with two externals.
posted by adamrice at 6:58 AM on February 6, 2006

I use Carbon Copy Cloner and two hard drives to backup both my desktop and laptop machines. As I don't have enough space to save the entirety of both systems, I just backup the user folder. You can always track down copies of your applications, it's the data you've created that's irreplaceable.

I should keep one of the hard drives in an off site location, but I don't have one readily available. For a while, I was keeping a drive at my parents house, but I'm not there frequently enough to make it work. Though it seems like overkill, I've actually given some thought to getting a safety deposit box specifically for this purpose.
posted by aladfar at 8:26 AM on February 6, 2006

SuperDuper! has all the connivence of a ronco roaster -- set it and forget it. The program makes an incremental fully bootable backup of the main drive. (or any other option you want, but really, just having a clone is the way.) It's a spectacularly easy and friendly program. I tried CarbonCopyCloner with numerous relatives. Got sick of taking tech support calls. Well worth the $27.95.
posted by mmdei at 10:18 AM on February 6, 2006

Use an external hard-drive and rsyncX. RsyncX uses the magic of UNIX to give you a daily automatic backup where all the files that stay the same from day-to-day are referred to using hard links, so disk space is not wasted with duplicates. eg. if you have 25GB, but only 100MB per day is actually changed, then 30 days of backups only takes up 28 GB of disk space. You get 30 folders, each of which appears to contain the full 25GB, but duplicate files are only written once.
This, coupled with weekly or monthly bootable backups to another hard disk kept in a separate location, should suffice.
posted by nowonmai at 10:36 AM on February 6, 2006

There is probably no one right way to do this. So here is what I do:

My home directory gets mirrored to an external firewire drive on a daily basis. All of my important stuff is checked into a subversion version control system, and that gets archived and encrypted (to protect confidential information), put on a USB drive and uploaded to a server from work. Mostly I like for my backups to be as system agnostic as possible.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 11:45 AM on February 6, 2006

For about $100 you can get a little Netgear box. Then you slap in 2 hard drives and it will make a happy RAID 0 (mirrored) array out of it. The docs say you need Windows but with Netgear stuff, you can usually use a Mac just fine.

Have your data back up to it. You can use the .Mac backup utility to back up to network volumes now.

that's just one idea. I see you have several more replies above mine, and all of them are good replies. :-)
posted by drstein at 1:40 PM on February 6, 2006

Err, not to pick nits, but RAID 0 is striping (for speed, at the expense of redundancy, and actively discouraged if you want security, because each hard drive has half your data); RAID 1 is mirroring.
posted by adamrice at 2:24 PM on February 6, 2006

Oh, and that little Netgear box really requires Windows (questioner uses a Mac), and is reportedly a PITA. It's a SAN box, when most people buying something like that want a NAS box (cripes, acronyms).
posted by adamrice at 2:26 PM on February 6, 2006

Another user of SuperDuper! here. I use it to backup my iBook's 80gig drive to an external drive—do it a couple of times a week or right before installing any OS updates.

You can use SuperDuper's Smart Copy function so that, once you've made an initial backup, subsequent backups backup only the new or changed files, shortening backup times to minutes.

The two things that sold me on SuperDuper! as my backup solution:

1. It's user interface explains everything in plain english—I have no fear of clicking on the OK button and then saying "Wait, my blank drive is being copied over my data drive?.. No, no, no, that's not what I wanted to happen!".

2. They have a free demo so you can try it out before you buy it. (The demo will do a full backup, but lacks the Smart Update feature)

(also, at $27.95, the price is pretty cheap and if you ever have any questions Dave in tech support replies to your email super quick)
posted by blueberry at 3:16 PM on February 6, 2006