As you are hopefully aware, backups are the only way to make sure you don’t lose your data in case of a crash or theft or an other disaster. There are several ways to back up your data, such as writing it to a tape-recorder stuck away in a fireproof vault.
Luckily there are easier methods as well.
My personal strategy is as follows: I keep one full backup of the PowerBooks hard drive on an external Firewire hard disk. Furthermore, I upload my documents and work (anything I code, basically) to Strongspace.
There are two programs I know of for the Mac which do full disk backups. One is Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC), the other is SuperDuper. I’ve used CCC for a couple of months, and I’ve recently bought a SuperDuper license. Whereas CCC seems to be aimed at users who know what they’re doing, SuperDuper is clearly for the folks who don’t and/or want assurance that the backup is really working. The interface is clear and consise, and the User’s Guide (pdf) is useful even if you don’t use SuperDuper. Please note that the risk of buying the application after reading the guide is significant. You’ve been warned.
My Strongspace backups are done by means of a combination of Ruby, rsync and SFTP. You can download the script here. It will allow you to upload specific directories, and it lets you exclude files and directories on a per directory basis. It will also remove files from Strongspace which no longer are on your disk. You can follow instructions on setting up a scripted backup at Invisible: Back-up. Instructions on my script are in the script itself.
And finally, there’s scheduling. You need to schedule your backups so you won’t forget making them. Please do as I say and not as I do, because I don’t schedule mine. I usually make a full backup before I take the PowerBook with me on a trip longer than the bycicle ride to university. If I’m not travelling for, say ten days, I’ll also make a backup. The Strongspace backups are made at least once a day, usually before I hit the sack. This means the latest stuff will have been backed up, no matter what time I go to sleep.
Luckily I haven’t needed my backups yet, but at least I’m prepared. I hope you will be, too.
It’s indeed quite handy, I personally don’t do backups, although I have recently had some trouble. I think I might use a solution like http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/
Btw, please fix your form, when you’re pressing in the Website-field, you don’t go to the Message field, but to the top of the page.
argh the tabindexes!
good article, and I totally agree. A few weeks ago I lost quite a bit of data from my primary hard drive, but most of it was backed up so I was OK. A general rule should follow, that the more remotely-operated apps (web apps presently) are used, the less need there is to backup. Just as long as the app providers keep our stuff backed up!
My PC holds an internl 250 GB HD and I’ve got an external 300 GB Firewire HD, which holds a complete back-up of all my files. The exteral HD has a big button on the front, which is I can configure through a script, which automatically uploads the new files to the external HD.
Takes less than a second
I count my lucky stars every time I have a backup consulted it for the file(s) in question. Interestingly enough, I never need the backups for when stuff crashes, but instead when I “spring clean” things like my Documents folder. I tend to use Subversion for my projects (may as well have source control along with remote storage), followed by incremental backups via rsync for anything more Mac-oriented. I have yet to find anything really really Windows friendly though aside from Norton Ghost and/or a really big and beefy removable drive; I never did manage to get rsync+cygwin to work like it was supposed to.
SuperDuper is new to me. It’s also now sitting in trial version as a dmg on my desktop. I have this excited fear I can only liken to the day I decided I was going to be buying Saft.
Sorry for the stupid question, but I can’t figure out for the life of me how to exclude a directory within the one that I’ve defined to backup. For example, I want to back up my entire Documents folders in my home directory except for the “Virtual PC List” folder. Getting it to back up ~/Documents was simple, but I can’t seem to get it to exclude the “Virtual PC List” folder. Any help would be mucbh appreciated. Thanks for the great script!
-Kyle
Hey that’s okay… I haven’t exactly written documentation for it
The script looks for a
.ss-ignorefile in every directory. Each line in this file is treated as a regular expression and matched against the directory/filename. If there is a match, the file is excluded.Thanks, Mark. I got it working. Maybe for a future revision of the script, it would be cool to have one centralized file that contained the path to all the files and folders you wanted to exlude rather than having a .ss-ignore file in ever folder you wanted something excluded in. All in all though, great script! Thanks again!
-Kyle
He Mark, lekker script hoor want het werkte meteen prima!
Greetz from Heiloo, NL
I really needed ths, as I am starting to learn ruby.
Thanks