Church Tech Arts

There are a ton of different strategies for backing up your data. What you do depends largely on what you are trying to accomplish, and what your tolerance for risk is. Remember, your hard drive will die one day, and you’ll be stranded unless you have a backup. 

Originally, I was going to try to come up with an exhaustive set of guidelines for backup. But as I’ve researched more and more, I’ve decided that is just about impossible. So instead, I will lay out a number of strategies that I am in the process of implementing, along with the rationale for them. At the end of the article, I’ll give you some links to go for more information. It should be noted that all of the computers I’m working on backing up are Macs. The software mentioned is Mac-based, but the principles still apply. I’m not a Windows guy, so I don’t have much experience with Windows backup software. I’ll give you some links at the end, and maybe Daniel will chime in on with a comment with his experience (Daniel is the Windows Yin to my Mac Yang)

Strategy #1: My MacBook Pro
I’ve been meaning to get my MBP backed up for a while now, but the point was driven home a few weeks ago. I was rushing through airport security theater at O’Hare, trying to fit all my earthly possessions into 3 gray trays. The line was moving fast, and I pushed the trays around the corner and the one containing my Mac (now outside of my backpack for “security” reasons) crashed to the ground. Thankfully, it emerged unscathed. But the point was taken; I have a big chunk of my life on there and recreating it from scratch would be darn near impossible.

What I’ve done for the MacBook Pro is to pick up a 500 Gig quad interface drive from OtherWorld Computing. I partitioned it off into a 150 Gig and about a 350 Gig (it’s less due to formatting losses). The 150 is a full, bootable backup made by Carbon Copy Cloner. The 350 Gig is a Time Machine target for incremental backups. 

It could be argued that this is redundant, because Time Machine backups are also full backups (unless you tell them not to be) and you can restore your entire drive from them if need be. However, doing that requires getting a new drive (or a new computer if that’s the case), booting from the OS DVD, and copying all the files to the new drive. That takes a good hour or two (I’m backing up 87 Gigs right now).

With a full, bootable backup, I can plug that drive into any computer that will run OS 10.5 and go back to work. No time wasted. This would be sufficient really, but because I have Time Machine, I use it. Time Machine is a defense against a file getting accidentally erased or corrupted. Since it runs every hour, it’s essentially on-line backup. I have Carbon Copy Clonerset to run an incremental backup (replacing only what’s changed) every Tuesday morning at 10:30 when I head into my creative meeting. 

Doing it this way also gives me 2 copies of my files, albeit on a single disk. Still, it’s a good way to keep moving should my laptop get stolen, or crash off of another shelf.

I’m also using this exact strategy for our ProPresenter iMac. My theory is that if the iMac goes down on Sunday, I can plug the drive into my MacBook Pro, boot from it, and in just a few minutes be back up and running. Time Machine will give me the latest files, and CCC will give me a recent bootable partition.

Strategy #2: My Boss’s & Pastor’s Laptops
My boss, Craig, uses a PowerBook G4 running Tiger. Our pastor, Kurt, uses a MacBook, also on Tiger. Time Machine would have worked great for them, but decided it wasn’t worth the disruption to upgrade to Leopard. So I bought external drives from OWC and we will use SuperDuper! to create full bootable backups of their drives. I’m going with SuperDuper! for them because the scheduling and incremental copy options are a little more flexible. SuperDuper! can do a smart incremental backup (which will update files that have changed since the last backup) or a smart copy, which copies new files, leaving the old versions in tact. This is the option I’ll use. 

I will work with them to find times when they are likely to have their laptops in the office and able to connect to the hard drive for a bit. We’ll schedule backup events to occur then, but if they aren’t in, the backups will run the next time they mount the drive. 

These backups will also be fully bootable, so if their laptops fail, they can plug into another machine and go back to work while their computer is repaired. I’m a big fan of bootable backups for this reason. 

Strategy #3: My MacPro Editor
This is my third solution. And it’s a bit of a tricky one due to the amount of data involved. As I routinely have a few hundred gigs of video, graphics, audio and other assorted goodies on my RAID capture drives, I needed a large solution for that. I also have 120+ gigs of OS and Applications on my boot drive. Now it’s true that if I lost that drive, I could re-install. But that would be a day-long project at least, especially since every app has been updated several times, and I’d loose all my preferences.

Once again, I turned to OWC, and bought a dual drive case. This case can be configured as a RAID 0 for speed; spanned (2 identical–or not–drives as one large volume, though I would never do this) or set up as a JBOD, Just a Bunch of Discs (in this case, 2). I filled one slot with a 750 gig, and the other with a 500 and set it up as JBOD. Each drive appears as a separate volume, yet only takes one FW 800 port. Very tidy!

The 750 will be a Time Machine target for my video drive, a 500 gig RAID 0. The 500 will be used for a bootable backup of the boot drive. I’ll probably use Carbon Copy Cloner, though the jury’s still out (I may go SuperDuper!). Either way, and you’re probably tired of hearing this by now, if the Mac crashes, I can take the bootable clone, plug in to another Mac and get back to work. If I loose my boot drive, I can drop in a new one in a few minutes, and restore from the backup and the Mac will never know what happened. The copy will take a few hours, but it will be right back the way I left it.

As you may have guessed, I’m a big fan of the bootable backup. I figure if I’m going to go to the trouble to backup, I may as well back up everything in such a way that the backup actually saves me time should I need it. 

In all cases, it’s important to be able to set up a schedule for your backups. Trying to remember to do it won’t work. Both SuperDuper! and CCC can be set up to back up as often as you like, and Time Machine defaults to every hour. If you’re not near your backup drive when the schedule kicks in, the software will start backing up when you reconnect. It’s important to get in the habit of plugging in your backup drive, especially if you’re running a laptop.

Now for you Windows users out there, most of the strategies and hardware would work just fine for you. The big difference is in software. In my research, I’ve seen Norton Ghost mentioned a lot, along with Acronis. Both seem to have similar functionality to SuperDuper! and will provide the ability to create backups you can boot from. Lifehacker has a good post (with even better comments) about backing up, and I found another site (aptly named, Backup Software Reviews) that reviewed 18 software programs for Windows. That should keep you busy for a while.

Though their URL is www.macsales.com, OtherWorld Computing is a great hard drive and memory resource for Macs and PCs alike. I’ve been buying from them for years and have never had a bad experience. Of course, you can find great deals at NewEgg (also a favorite vendor) and your local big box store. Drives are getting cheaper every day (the 500 gig I bought last week dropped $4 in the two days it took to go from IL to my office…), so there’s really no excuse to not back up.

As always, no company mentioned in this post pays me to say anything nice about their stuff. But it’s what I’ve been using and had good results with. Your mileage may vary.

I used to love watching Home Improvement. One of Tim the Toolman Taylor’s favorite sayings was “Back the truck up!” I thought I would appropriate (and modify) that saying for today’s title. So now you can go back and read the title with appropriate emphasis. Ar, ar, ar…

So we all know we should back up our data. But how often do we actually do it? We all know that it’s not a question of if our hard drive (or entire computer) will fail us, but when. But what do we do about it? Before we talk strategy, consider the following tale. 

Our lead pastor, Kurt, was out of town a few months ago. One morning, he went to wake up his MacBook and heard that unnerving sound of a drive that won’t spin up. All he got on the screen was the flashing disk/question mark icon. He took it into the Apple store and after some tests, they couldn’t get the drive to spin either. It was a total hardware failure. All his data was lost. In fact, the only thing he had left, was his iPhone, which had his contacts and music on it. 

After having a new hard drive installed, new system software loaded, and all applications reloaded he went to sync his iPhone. In a perfect world, it would have moved all of his contacts and music back to his new hard drive. Except he didn’t read the dialog box closely enough and he ended up blanking his iPhone. Now it was all gone. Luckily, he had a…no wait; he didn’t have a backup. Now that hurts, I don’t care what planet you’re from!

Now that I’ve hopefully scared you into thinking you actually need to backup your data, let’s consider some options for doing so. 

Network/Server Backup
If you are connected to a server system such as an Exchange server or a Tiger or Leopard server, you are probably backed up on a regular basis. Still, it’s not a bad idea to check in with your network administrator to find out what and how often your data is backed up. One of the great new features of Leopard server is the Time Machine backup feature. It makes backing up your user account very simple, assuming the server has enough storage space to accommodate all users. 

Network storage is great as typically it’s going to be a RAID. RAID storage, when configured properly, gives you some security in case of a drive failure. RAID 1 is a mirror copy–that is, two drives with identical information. One fails, the other still has all the data. Arguably better is RAID 5, which stripes the data across multiple drives and in the event of a single drive failure, the data can be rebuilt. You can even set up RAIDs that will survive multiple, simultaneous drive failures. These are not cheap, however. Your network storage may also be backed up on a tape drive for further security. If you take the tapes off-site, you really have a strong system going.

While this is a great plan, it gets expensive quickly and typically requires some in-depth IT knowledge to set up and manage effectively. 

Network Attached Storage (NAS)
Many manufacturers are coming out with NAS devices. These nifty devices are essentially hard drive enclosures with a Gigabit or Fast Ethernet port on them. Hook them up to your network and you can backup right to them. You can pick up a few terabytes of storage for under $1,500, which would accommodate a dozen or so people. They are often configured as RAID systems, so they too provide a level of protection against a hard disk failure. There are a few caveats, however.

First, you typically need some type of software to backup your computer. Often it comes with the NAS device, which is good. Apple’s Time Machine would be great, but it only backs up to Apple’s own Time Capsule, Leopard server or an Airport Extreme base station with a hard drive attached. There are some workarounds, but they are tricky. For a few people, the Time Capsule is a good solution, as would be an Airport Extreme base station and external drive. The downside is that they only work with the Mac, and they will quickly max out with more than few people using them.

The second caveat is speed. Gigabit Ethernet is pretty darned quick, but unless your IT infrastructure is built out to support it, chances are, you’ll only be getting Fast Ethernet speeds. Once you get to the point of doing incremental backups (which we’ll get to tomorrow), the network speed isn’t that big of an issue. But, if you’re like me and have 87+ Gigs of stuff on your laptop’s drive, that first run at backup is going to take a while. Backing up the 250+ Gigs of media on my MacPro editor would be a good weekend project. If you’re setting up a NAS backup, plan on doing one user per day, and start the initial backup first thing in the morning. 

Local Hard Drives
This is perhaps the easiest and fastest to implement. And now that drives are as inexpensive as they are, it might be the cheapest. You can pick up a 500 Gig hard drive at your big box store or online for $150 (less if you stick with USB 2.0). Plug it into your computer, and it’s backup and away. Last week Santa (OK, it was the UPS guy brining a box from my favorite drive store, Other World Computing) brought me three external drives; two 500 gig quad-interface (USB 2.0, FireWire 400 & 800 and eSATA) and a dual drive enclosure with a 500 Gig and 750 gig inside (with USB 2.0 and FireWire 400 & 800). The tab for all this storage (2.25 Terabytes!) was about $600. 

Using the FireWire 800 interface, I hooked into my MacBook Pro and had Time Machine go to work. A little over an hour later and my entire drive was backed up. I will be deploying the other drives to different computers in the office this week. 

The nice thing about local hard drives for laptops is that you have essentially off-site storage for your backup. That is, if your laptop is with you and your office burns down, though your backup is lost, you still have your data. If your laptop flies off the roof of your car because your wife put it there while buckling the kids in (this actually happened to someone…), your data is safe at the office. 

The downside of local hard drives is that a backup hard drive is still a hard drive, and will fail eventually. It’s never a bad idea to have an additional backup of really critical data. For that, you can look into tape, optical or even online storage with a company that provides that service. 

Optical Backup
This doesn’t really qualify as backup, per se, but it could be a viable option. Burning DVDs of your iTunes library, photos or other files that you want to keep safe (and that don’t change that often) is a good way to keep them safe. Managing it can be a chore, however. You can quickly end up with a stack of discs with no way to quickly find the files you need. Still, I wouldn’t argue with anyone who burns their photo library to DVD once in a while. 

Well, there are a few targets for backup. Tomorrow, we’ll discuss strategies for making sure you have stuff backed up in a way that’s useful, efficient, and most of all, there when you need it.