Keys That Click - Minding your own design business and other observations

Posted in Tech, on March 15th, 2010 by Carlos.

Whether you run a business, or use your computer for personal purposes, or both – you can always benefit from having a backup plan for your data. Unfortunately most people realize they need a backup plan only once they’ve lost data to a faulty hard drive, theft or more catastrophic events like fires and floods. There may have been a time when losing your computer data didn’t mean much more than a little lost time and annoyance. However, as we continue to digitize nearly every aspect of our lives – social connections, photos, music collections, books, our careers – losing our data means more than just dealing with a little annoyance. Imagine loosing all your family photos, or losing the very work that provides income for you and your family. Scared? Well good… as long as it motivates you to do something about it!

Finding the backup solution that works right for you may be a little daunting, depending on how sophisticated you want to get. In my quest for an ideal backup plan, I searched the web high and low, talked to friends and colleagues and frankly took some gambles to figure it out. Because every usage scenario is different and there are an infinite number of scenarios, I’ll just explain my setup which will hopefully guide you in determining what fits your needs best. Granted, my backup plan may border on the side of paranoia, but I’d rather be safe than sorry. As a caveat, I am a Mac user, so a lot of this is Mac specific, but I’m sure you can make some pointers and apply something similar to a Windows environment.

The Tools – Software: I use several different backup software packages for my backup solution, for my computers (desktop and laptop). These include Shirt Pocket’s SuperDuper!, Code 42′s CrashPlan+ and Apple’s incredibly easy to use Time Machine.*

*If you don’t have a backup plan and are trying to figure something out, go get yourself an external hard drive and turn Time Machine on NOW. It’s simple, it’s free (assuming you are already running Leopard or Snow Leopard), and oh right, did I mention it’s simple? Don’t wait around to get something figured out  – karma may kick you in the butt while you’re humming and hawing over what backup strategy to implement.

The Tools – Hardware: DataRobotic’s Drobo, loaded with a few Western Digital 1 TB Caviar Green SATA Desktop Internal Hard Drives, an Eagle Tech eSATA drive enclosure, and a few machines: Mac Pro with eSATA card, Mac mini that has the Drobo connected to it, and my MacBook laptop.

SuperDuper! clone of system drive: My OS runs on its own Western Digital Raptor drive with all my apps and personal settings saved on it. I do this not only to protect my data against possible OS mishaps, but also for the speed benefits of having your system on its own drive. I backup this drive once a day (but usually it’s more like once a week) using SuperDuper! to create an exact clone of the drive. SuperDuper! can also create bootable clones of your system drive. Having an immediate method of booting my computer without losing any time restoring in case of a system failure comes in handy. For individuals that will be negatively impacted by waiting several hours for a Time Machine backup to restore your system, this method helps you get back up and running simply by rebooting your system using this drive. To make this part quick and painless, I have it connected to my Mac Pro via eSATA taking a measly 10 minutes to do an incremental backup (your initial backup will take longer). This has already saved me from System Updates gone bad that mess up my system. This allows me to boot from my external drive with an exact clone of my drive before the update. Because of this, I’m always sure to have backup before installing any major system updates pushed by Apple. SuperDuper! is available for free, but the full-featured version that allows for scheduling, incremental backups and other advanced features is only $27.95.

CrashPlan+ for work files, photos, etc. Because I’m self-employed and work from home, my computer is full of both personal files and work files, that are in my mind, equally important. My user data is stored on my Mac Pro on a separate drive from my OS for reasons mentioned above. I use CrashPlan+ to back up these files over my local network to my Drobo that is connected to my Mac mini, as well as a remote backup to my friend’s house where I’ve placed an external hard drive connected to his Mac mini that is on nearly 24/7. So why CrashPlan?

CrashPlan offers encrypted backups – so in case of theft, your data is protected, which is especially handy if you remotely back up to someone else’s house. I trust my friend, but now I don’t have to worry if someone breaks into his house and steals the drive. The 448-bit encryption (the paid version has this protection, while the free version uses 128-bit encryption) helps keep my mind at ease.

CrashPlan facilitates backing up to multiple locations and multiple OSes. You choose what files you want to backup and the locations where you want to back them up to. You can back up to local folders/machines, to a family or friend’s computer as well as the option to use CrashPlan’s paid offsite service. A remote backup will protect you against a catastrophic event (fire, flood, etc.) or theft. CrashPlan makes making remote backups easy. To minimize the initial impact of a large backup, it will allow you make an initial backup at your local machine, and then bring your drive to your family/friend’s house and then do incremental backups from then on.

What’s also neat is that CrashPlan runs on Windows, Mac OS and Linux machines so your options of who you want to back up to aren’t limited by their OS.

CrashPlan smartly backs up your data. Meaning what? Meaning that CrashPlan knows if you’ve simply moved data from one for folder to another, or if you’ve made a copy. If you moved a folder of movies, for example, that was 20GB large, CrashPlan would recognize that you simply moved the files, and won’t back it up again. Instead it will just register it as a move and update the path accordingly. Other backup solutions (like Time Machine) don’t necessarily do this. Time Machine would actually see this as a new set of files in a new folder and make a backup of the “new” movies while keeping a backup of the old movies as well. You can see how that adds up. Plus when backing up remotely that would be a huge drain on your Internet connection.

CrashPlan uses compression. When I previously only relied on my Time Machine, I had well over 1 TB of backup on my Drobo. Because of the smart backups mentioned above, as well as a compression, you wind up saving a lot of space leaving more room for backups. My backup now hovering around 500GB instead of over 1TB.  This also makes a huge difference when backing up remotely over the web. With compressed files, you are sending less data, meaning you get to free up a little more bandwidth.

CrashPlan is available for free and has several great features, but the paid version, called CrashPlan+ gives you some more robust options. CrashPlan+ is available for $59.99.

Time Machine for laptop. I generally don’t keep important files on my laptop, but from time to time I will do work on it, or fiddle with iPhoto or Garage Band. Because of this, I keep a backup of my laptop as well. Seeing as how it’s not super critical data however, I resort to Time Machine for ease of use and simplicity. Time Machine is great for no-nonsense and no-hassle backups. I run my backups over the network so I’m not needing to plug in an external drive all the time – if I had to do it that way, I’d probably backup less often than I should. Keeping your backup solutions simple and easy to adhere to will make all the difference.

I used to rely solely on Time Machine for all my backup needs, but found that it had some limitations, such as it’s inability to recognize moved vs. new files, it’s remote backup capabilities (which are none), etc. To be honest however, I don’t think these limitations would apply to most people looking for an easy and quick way to protect their data. Time Machine is a great solution for most Mac users out there and its interface wins hands down over the rest that I’ve tried. For you Windows users, it does look like there is is a backup/restore tool available in Windows 7, but I honestly do not know enough about it, so I recommend you do some research.

Hard Drives, RAID, Drobo. More often than not, you’ll likely lose your data to hard drive failure. While there are plenty of data recovery services out there, you should only rely on that as a last resort. If you’re really concerned about your data, make sure you are running decent hard drives. No brand or model is fool-proof, but if you know your drive is as older than your kid that’s about to go into high school, then be proactive and upgrade you drives!

If you are worried about how much backup space you have, most of these backup options allow you to exclude certain files from backing up. Files I exclude from my backups range from my Downloads folder (if I download an app, for example, I keep the app itself backed up, but not the ZIP file I downloaded it in, Mail attachments (because they’re still on the mail server), and Virtual Machines (such as my Windows 7 image running in VM Ware Fusion). Just be absolutely sure that you can live without these files if you were to lose your data.

You can also look into running some RAID options, or using a Drobo device. These devices will store your data over multiple drives to protect against hard drive failure. For example, I have 3 drives in my Drobo now. If one were to fail, I could easily replace the failed drive without having lost any of my data. Raid setups, or Drobo’s add another layer of protection to your backup plan.

And finally budget. You can obviously see that the costs can start to add up when looking into robust backup solutions. But, you can start small and work your way up. Time Machine with an external drive is probably the cheapest solution. Perhaps as time goes on you’ll see your needs change and you can begin to upgrade your backup components. Create and stick to a budget so you can make it happen. What is all your data worth to you? It may very well be priceless… so you don’t necessarily want to skimp in this department.

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Well there you have it folks. Given that I employ several different backup methods, you may very well see something that makes sense for you. Remember the best backup plan is one that you have to think little about once you’ve set it up. When you finally lose your data for one reason or another (not a matter of if, but when) you’ll be happy you’ve taken measures to protect it!

If you have any questions for me, leave me a comment and I’ll try answer it as best I can!