Monday
Apr162012
Question: Backups?
Monday, April 16, 2012 at 3:00AM How do you backup your digital information? For me it is mainly through Time Machine on the iMac with some data stored in a couple of online services.
Monday, April 16, 2012 at 3:00AM
Reader Comments (6)
Time Machine for my Macs of course. I'm running Lion Server on my Mac Mini and back up the Mini, my Macbook and my Macbook Air all to the same Time Machine disk. For my iPhone - iCloud is good enough. And I have my most important documents backed up to Dropbox as well.
I use Time Machknd but, since the two times I've tried to recover from it, it hasn't worked, I'm not sure why I bother.
Everything important is synchronised via Unison (an outstanding tool) anyway, and music and video are held in two places too. Since my needs are so basic, getting everything up and running on a "fresh" computer is trivial, and, as long as I have my documents, easy enough to do by hand.
iPhone and iPad are synced to my MacBook daily.
I used to use Time Machine but found it sometimes very slow, and then it filled up and I didn't really need all those backup versions. And I was doing weekly clones or clone updates anyway. So I got DirectorySync which synchronizes directories automatically in the background. All my document directories are set up to sync automatically to an external drive. Plus I still do the weekly clones using Carbon Copy Cloner. The clone is then copied to a Passport drive which I put in my briefcase as my offsite backup.
The only time it takes me is to click for the iTunes syncs, start up CCC, and do the copy. Maybe 5 minutes of clicking a week.
Sounds like I should look into DirectorySync — I've started writing something which would do the same, and a pre-built solution sounds like a plan, if it can handle permissions...
I use plain external disk (with copy paste options) and for the tablet, my main apps can do a backup file and I than copy it to disk. No Cloud business here ;)
Dropbox for important files - it's a no brainer working across Mac/Windows/iPhone.
Evernote for same reason
Use Acronis True Image for local backups to an extenal hard drive, daily, weekly, monthly inc a system clone monthly