As promised in a previous article, I’ve been spending a bit more time researching backup options with OSX. Number One priority for backup - you actually need space to store your data. For now, I’ve been mostly looking into local hard drive storage.
At the very least, you need one external hard drive to store your data - a backup on the same drive will do you almost no good, because in most cases data loss affects entire drives. Yes, storing on the local drive will cover you against accidental deletes of single files, but that’s not a sufficient solution. You do want a bootable backup of your entire hard drive - SuperDuper is one of the best software solutions for this.
Even better if you have two hard drives - this way, you can store one hard drive off site and update it from time to time. Especially here in quake- and fire-prone California, it’s good to know you have your data in a physically different location.
And if you run Time Machine, you want to add yet another hard drive - it’s not a bootable backup, and booting from your installation CD with a subsequent restore via Time Machine is not something I’d look forward to.
That’s a ton of hard drives - where can you get them for an affordable price? Well, if you’re like me, you’ll have a couple old hard drives lying around. All you need to do is buy an external enclosure - I picked the Rocketfish Enclosure because it’s red, shiny, and cheap - and put in your old IDE hard drive.
Alternatively, big hard drives are cheap these days - I just bought a 500 GB Iomega Drive for about $140. That boils down to less than 30 cents per Gigabyte.
Once you’ve got those and a regular backup schedule - at least once a week! - you have some basic protection in place. Next time, I’ll take a look at online backup solutions. But believe me, you want at least one local, bootable backup.
Previous Posts: