A gentle reminder to backup

[caelyx]

Just a reminder, that really should go without saying. If your "trusted
system" is even partially electronic, like mine, be damn sure you back
up frequently. I think I'll start doing it as part of my weekly review,
if not more often.

I only say this because I forgot to back up, for three weeks.
Yesterday, the hard drive in my iBook died, and took my life with it,
including my GTD lists and most of my thesis references. :)
Fortunately, I can reconstitute most of that stuff, but it's time
consuming and painful.

So, please accept my plaintive plea: backup, if you aren't already.

-s

[Todd]

Yes, I agree. I back up (with SuperDuper!) my entire system once a week
(e.g., work laptop, pictures and music on home iMac), but I'm not sure
that's enough. The other day I "securely deleted" a very important file
in my trash. I was able to retrieve the file from my backup, but of
course it didn't have the most recent changes. This was painful.

It just occured to me that I might be able to make a smart folder that
contained items only updated within the last week. These files could
then be automatically synced to my iDisk. That way, if I lose or delete
a file that had been changed since the last system backup, I would have
it on my iDisk. Is this possible? Perhaps there is a better solution?
Ideas anyone?

[JayJay]

Backup has to be fully automatic, because users tend to forget ;)

An excellent for *NIX hackers:
http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/

(The guide targets Linux, but also suitable for Mac OS X after some
small modifications)

[Derek]

For those Mac users out there, there is also SilverKeeper (Free),
which I use on one of my machines:

http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10097

And Carbon Copy Cloner (Free):

http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html

SilverKeeper has the ability to exclude directories. I think that
CCC has the ability also, but only at the root level or it basically
backs it up and then deletes it or something weird like that. It's
been a long time since I've looked at CCC, but I was impressed with
it initially.

I *highly* recommend that whenever you buy a computer just
immediately buy an external firewire drive that is the same size as
your internal drive and then do a nightly backup. On one of my
machines, I actually have a firewire drive that is three times larger
than the internal drive. I partitioned the drive into three parts
and I use one partition to backup daily, weekly and then monthly
respectively.

Derek

[Brian McGroarty]

I'm using rsync for my Mac backups. In Tiger, there is a "-E" option
to preserve extended attributes, even when syncing to a non-Mac
system. Other than that, Linux instructions should apply.

Your simplest solution might look like this:

sudo rsync -avE --delete --exclude ".Trash" /Users /Volumes/
MyUSBDrive/Backup/

Assuming you're running Tiger, you have an external volume named
MyUSBDrive, and you have a folder named Backup on that drive, this
will fully back up all your login accounts except for the Trash Cans.
Subsequent runs will be very fast, only copying changed files. If
you're not running Tiger, replace -avE with -av.

I also add: --exclude "*.noback"

The noback exclusion omits files or folders ending in ".noback". For
example, if I rip a DVD to watch later, I'll name the containing
folder "movies.noback" to keep a few 4-9 gig films out of the backup
set.

On Jul 1, 2005, at 3:37 AM, JayJay wrote:

[JayJay]

rsync lets you specify an exclude list, which is an ASCII text file
containing the file / folder name patterns you want to be excluded from
the source.

The switch is:

--exclude-from=FILE

[Jared M. Spool]

For once, I'm happy I have a PC.

I keep my GTD stuff in my palm. I have the Palm desktop files located on my
office server, where I've set the folder to be "Make Available Offline."

Every time I log into my office server, any changes I've made are
automatically synchronized between my laptop and the server. The server is
backed up nightly. So, I end up with a copy on the nightly backup, on the
server drive, on my laptop drive, and in my palm. I think I got it covered
for almost anything short of alien invasion.

Jared

Jared M. Spool, Founding Principal
User Interface Engineering
4 Lookout Lane, Unit 4d
Middleton, MA 01949
978 777-9123
jsp...@uie.com
http://www.uie.com

[Neil Ford]

On 1 Jul 2005, at 12:29, Derek wrote:

> I *highly* recommend that whenever you buy a computer just
> immediately buy an external firewire drive that is the same size as
> your internal drive and then do a nightly backup. On one of my
> machines, I actually have a firewire drive that is three times
> larger than the internal drive. I partitioned the drive into three
> parts and I use one partition to backup daily, weekly and then
> monthly respectively.

One word of caution, if the drive controller fails (the one on the
drive, not the one in the external case), then you've lost
everything. Data recovery companies charge a small fortune to try and
recover data in these circumstances. Might be worth considering a
second drive for the monthly backup, just so you spread the risk.

It is always a good idea to back up critical data to another media
type. I back my powerbook up to external drives and burn critical
data to DVD, just in case the drives fail. I use Toast to make the
DVD and burn it so it can be read on a PC and a Mac, just in case. On
reason for using platform independent file formats (plain text, etc.)
rather than proprietary ones. No Entourage for me I'm afraid and I
export my Address Book to a CSV file on a weekly basis.

Can you tell I've been working IT support to a very long time?

- Neil.

[Betsy Schwartz]

Another caution: If you have something really critical, like a book or thesis or business records, you should
do all of these things:

  -keep a backup copy SOMEWHERE ELSE
   (in case your house burns down or your computer stuff is stolen)
  -keep MULTIPLE COPIES from DIFFERENT DATES
   (in case your book file is corrupted, your most recent backup could be of the bad file!)
  -Try doing a restore on ANOTHER COMPUTER every now and then
   (in case your drive has gone wonky and is writing CD's that only it can read!)

And if there's one super critical thing, like a thesis, it wouldn't hurt to have a paper copy or two somewhere

signed, also done IT support for several decades.