Backups On Your Mac – A Practical Approach

It’s true – there are only two kinds of people in the modern digital world:

- Those who have suffered data loss as the result of a hard drive crash
- And those who will

Backups – few things about working with computers come close to being as important as backups. If you are lucky, you learn your lesson (painful as it may be) about Backups the first time you watch hours / days / weeks / months or even year worth of work, fun, family memories, etc disappear into the ether when your hard drive fails. It’s unlikely that there is a person out there who doesn’t understand that they should be doing regular backups of their most important data. Those same also understand that they should be getting more exercise, eating better, stop smoking (among other things) but I’d be willing to bet, they don’t do those things either.

So why don’t more people have a current backup of their data or make the process of backing things up a part of their every day lives? I’ve got a guess why, it’s just not a process that most people can really get their heads around. It’s not fun, or sexy and besides, what are the changes that YOUR hard drive is going to crash out of all those other hard drives spinning away in the world. Even among the technically elite, backup strategies are a topic of much debate about the best way to go about it but catching a true geek without a reliable backup is akin to finding a good lawyer without a pre-nuptial agreement – sadly, both scenarios can and do happen.

I found myself in just such a boat last week as my fairly new 17″ Powerbook decided that life was just too much to bear and decided to just ‘expire’ itself, talking my data along with it. Fortunately, I walk my talk and I’m religious about doing full weekly backups — but on the day it occurred, it had been a full 5 days since my last backup and so I was out of luck for 5 very long days worth of code writing and pending deadline. Upon receiving the laptop back from Apple, along with a shiny new 100GB drive (which was sadly completely empty). In further reflecting on the situation, it became clear that for my own needs, weekly backups were simply inadequate and I needed to come with a better solution. One that would meet my needs, but at the same time, be realistically doable in my life. There is no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to backups but I do want to encourage you, before it happens to you, to go get educated about your options and then do something about it.

The single best resource I’ve ever seen is from the Take Control series of eBooks called: Take Control of Mac OS X Backups. They talk about specific products, backup strategies and basically everything you would need to know to make sure you are prepared for the inevitable. Do yourself a huge favor and do a little planning for when (not if) this happens to you. Trust me, you’ll thank me later. You might already have everything you will but even if it requires you acquiring an external Firewire or USB drive, it is money well spent (with prices constantly falling, even today I saw a 500GB External LaCie FW drive for around $350). Whatever the cost, it pales in comparison to what you stand to loose.

In addition, Apple has a formal page entitled How to back up and restore your important Mac OS X 10.4 files which is stock full of real world tips on this very subject – a must read by all accounts.