PSA: BACKUP!!

[bazookaman]

I am happy to say that my CrashPlan...ahem...plan is working marvelously. All hundreds of gb of data backed up remotely. I love it. Of course I still do local backups.

[GGD]

At 1:00am every day, a MacBook that acts as my home server, starts a SuperDuper backup of it's internal drive to a disk image on a 2TB External FW Backup drive.

At 1:00am that server also sends a Wake-on-LAN to both mine and my wife's MacBook Pros, to wake them from sleep.

At 1:01am, both MacBook Pros start SuperDuper backups over the network to disk images on that 2TB External FW Backup drive. When the backup is complete, the network server gets unmounted and the computers go back to sleep.

By about 1:20am, it's all done, the 2TB Drive spins down, and it repeats the next day.

[silvarios]

I agree, automation is the key. I use Carbon Copy Cloner precisely for this reason. Automated backups over the LAN is a nice setup, highly recommend it.

For offsite, I am going to start backing up to a trusted location that I control. The first backup can be to a local hard drive. Then I can take the hard drive to the offsite location and only transfer incremental changes over the Internet.


Nathan

[PeterB]

Automated backups are good, BUT be careful that they're actually happening. I recently discovered that mine weren't-- it was easy enough to fix, but I didn't have anything set to actively alert me that they weren't.

[Doc]

bazookaman wrote:
I am happy to say that my CrashPlan...ahem...plan is working marvelously. All hundreds of gb of data backed up remotely. I love it. Of course I still do local backups.

I was pretty happy with CrashPlan, but then I discovered that the backup for one of my Macs that was supposedly up to date was missing a couple of hundred GB of recent files.

I had to manually run a "scan" to get it backing up again.

This is apparently a well-known bug.

I don't trust it anymore, but haven't found anything better for remote backups yet.

Spot-check your backups.

[silvarios]

PeterB wrote:
Automated backups are good, BUT be careful that they're actually happening. I recently discovered that mine weren't-- it was easy enough to fix, but I didn't have anything set to actively alert me that they weren't.

Yep. Great advice. While CCC will report errors in the backup process, it is better to be safe than sorry and perform the occasional manual inspection of your backup (for bootable clones, that means actually booting the system from the clone).