I’m thumbing this post on my BlackBerry by gate 16 of Ottawa International Airport following the seed of a conversation with Donna Pappacosta on my earlier post about Carbon Copy.
No matter your platform, no matter if you’re a hobbyist or professional, how do you protect your electronic data? Which software do you use, if any? How often do you backup? To what media? Where do you store any backups?
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I served as bass player for various, early, incarnations of the Robert Farrell Band, last performing with Robert in 1997. After a long hiaitus from music to focus on family and a career, I started working on my first CD, real, in 2004 — before I discovered Podcasting.
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November 15th, 2007 at 9:55 pm
I discovered this summer that my backup regimen works pretty well. I had the Western Digital drive I’d upgraded in my MacBook die on me, but I had a relatively recent backup from Carbon Copy Cloner, so I could get my machine back into shape temporarily with the original stock drive, and then restore to the warranty replacement WD drive later.
What really saved my bacon, though, was that all my email is now in Gmail, and pretty much all of my photos are on Flickr. Email wasn’t affected at all, and the dozen or so photos I didn’t have backed up were simple, if a little time-consuming, to download from Flickr.
My backup regime isn’t as formal as it used to be, but consists of regular Carbon Copy clones of my drive (both my eMac and my MacBook), scheduled backups of purchased music and some other critical files from my eMac to Apple’s iDisk via the Backup app, posting photos to Flickr, and occasionally burning DVDs of photos, purchased music, original music, and podcasts (things that are difficult to replace). I make two copies, and take one set to my office — rarely these days, since I’m on medical leave, but I plan to schlep down some on Monday.
When I was at work regularly and only had one main computer, I did CCC backups to two different drives and took one to work, swapping them each week. That way if my house burned down I’d only lose a week of stuff. I’m a little uneasy that I haven’t done that recently.
I’m planning on buying one or two extra drives and switching over to Apple’s new Time Machine in Leopard for ease of restore, but having a fully bootable CCC backup will still be part of the plan, since Time Machine backups, while complete, won’t boot your Mac.
Yes, I learned this the hard way.
November 15th, 2007 at 9:57 pm
Oops, sorry, that dead drive in the MacBook was a Seagate.