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- thelastknowngod, on 10/12/2007, -3/+21you really have the dumb way covered. no need to spend unnecessary DOLORS.
- Urusai, on 10/12/2007, -2/+14dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb ?
- its...Betty, on 10/12/2007, -0/+11um, since I just recently lost everything on my mac, your comment angers me
- steelphantom, on 10/12/2007, -2/+12Macs have hard drives that can fail too, you know.
- Dog_Paddle, on 10/12/2007, -2/+10Hard drives fail sooner or later. They aren't invincible.
- alanp, on 10/12/2007, -4/+11What crap. The guys has obviously never heard of rsync. Stupid ideas he has....
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7dolor (noun)
a state of great sorrow or distress : "they squatted, hunched in their habitual dolor."
Hey, I've got a new word to describe PC users. - garyinthehouse, on 10/12/2007, -4/+10a pc is a pc, and at one point it will crash.
- CRASSPUNXTEXHTV, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6why not use an external hdd and i sync it is a killer combo
- neutrino, on 10/12/2007, -3/+8dugg for a really smart iTunes backup idea! I think I'm going to use that now.
- elpayo, on 10/22/2007, -0/+5I like Deja Vu - it uses rsync and is a simple pref pane.
- mike9376, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4I use unison. Its free, open source and "Best of all, it lets me ignore certain files that I don't want to include." Superduper!
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5Ever hear of an external HD?
"Works with PCs too!!!!11!!1111" - schleufer, on 10/22/2007, -0/+3So where is the article telling me how to back up a Mac "unintelligently"? Y'know... just for comparison.
- booted, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4haha..thats what I said when I took my powerbook for a repair. The genius asked me if I wanted to backup my stuff. I was like...nahhh, I backed it up 2 months ago. The computer came back 1 week later with everything wiped. Lesson learned, always backup, regularly.
- samdu, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Exactly. People seem to think copying a hard drive to another hard drive is "backing up." It's not. It's a short-term long-way-around mirror. Say Folder A gets copied to the external hard drive. The next day, Folder A on the original drive gets corrupt without your knowledge and then copied over the external copy. Now you're screwed. However, if Folder A were being written to a DVD every week or so, you've only lost the contents since the folder became corrupt. You've still got a working copy of everything before that point. Take a lesson from the corporate world regarding backups. They do it the way they do it for a reason. Then again, it's your data...
I do like the iTunes backup idea, though (and notice how the music gets dumped to DVD on a regular basis, but the - arguably - more important data doesn't). - nilobject, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Screw paying for something, here's my free way to do it:
Buy a large external HD. Partition it (Name it "Backup") and make it slightly larger than your internal HD's size. You can use the other partition for whatever. I use the other partition for non-essential movies and games.
Then, save this script as "backup.command". Then you only have to double click the file and enter your password to run it. NOTE: make sure you customize the path names below. Mine might not be the same as yours:
time sudo rsync -a --delete --exclude /dev/* --exclude /afs/* --exclude /private/tmp/* --exclude /var/spool/* --exclude /Network/* --exclude /Volumes/* --exclude /automount/* --exclude /private/var/run/* --exclude /Users/nilobject/Library/Caches/Safari/* --exclude /private/var/spool/postfix/private/* -e ssh "/Volumes/Macintosh HD/" /Volumes/Backup/ --eahfs --showtogo --stats; sudo bless -folder /Volumes/Backup/System/Library/CoreServices
Presto: A bootable-backup. After the first backup, only the files that are new, deleted or changed will be updated.
Save yourself the cash. - rspeed, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3That's the most pathetic attempt at trolling I've seen in quite some time.
- bnardone, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3I hope that you have a backup plan for that too.
- mcbesq, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3It's a fun game that you should know all about. It's called "Trolling For Flames." It's real simple. Make a snide, uninformed remark about one side of a binary or tripartite argument (Sony v. Xbox; Nintendo v. Xbox; Apple v. MS; Linux v. Windows, etc.). It's best if you can insult one camp completely. Then, watch the flamewar erupt, knowing that your comment will be downmodded until you are completely anonymous.
Yes, I'm being sarcastic. I'm actually planning on getting the MacBook but am waiting for the odd-ball bugs to be worked out of the first batch. I care about both style and dependability, which is why I don't have problems with my current puter. I have a 2.5 year-old LifeBook from Fujitsu. Because I can't stand the default XP interface, I skinned it.
While the MacZealotry creeps me out, if the machine works, I got no quarrel with it. Right now, from what it sounds, the MacBook has a few unresolved issues but is otherwise a good machine. - tfaz1, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I don't know. This seems too complicated. Perhaps I'm not intelligent enough. I subscribe to his file server approach, and have a separate computer (my wife's) that I use to backup my entire Home folder. Everything. But why split your data up and put some of it on DVD's, some of it on a HDD, etc.
I know HDD's fail, but what are the chances of both your main AND backup drive failing at the same time? Pretty darn remote, if you ask me. Just put everything on another drive and call it a day. Short of Armageddon, you should be safe.
As for applications, I use a separate portable HDD to disk image each new application I, er... buy. That way I can easily reinstall applications quickly and take it with me to help out a friend.
So, I appreciate his enthusiasm - but no Digg. - compwizz, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4Site is really slow, here is a mirror:
http://www.duggmirror.com/apple/How_To_Backup_Your_Mac_Intelligently/ - bnardone, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Except for when they disappear for over a week in a repair and you have work to do. I am enjoying the backups that have been restored to my Linux machine at present.
- FluffyArmada, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2You don't, because you're screwed.
- streak, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Exactomundo!
So tell me, why is this the "best" way to backup a Mac? Oh, you meant THAT kind of best. I was thinking of the other kind... of which there actually is one. - agilligan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@Diganta
You need a .Mac account to download Backup from Apple, but you can backup data to any location you want. - Dangerman, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2There are 10 kinds of people in the world those who can read binar... I mean those who will lose data and those who backup.
I have been both. - tylerhall, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Because I'm in a different time zone than her.
- goodcompany, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2For .mac users Apple's Backup 3.0 really simplifies this process, makes incremental backups and snapshots of any portion of your data really easy to manage. Combine Backup with a 300GB DiskStation (NAS) and you can easily make neat up-to-date backups of everything you have over your home network without burning discs. Also makes it very easy to restore to a new machine or to your current machine after a fresh install.
The NAS I got from Synology also has USB ports for an external drive, and software which allows you to on the click of a button make a copy of anything to specify to the attached USB drive. Every few weeks, after I have added important photos or updated my music in some major way, I ferry this drive between a location offsite, making a fresh copy of the backups on my NAS while it's here.
I don't know if it is as secure or complete as burning all these DVD's, but it offers some level of redundancy and is (thanks to Backup 3) very, very easy to update and schedule the whole process according to your needs. This software also allows you to backup to DVD if you prefer that. - thelastknowngod, on 10/12/2007, -4/+5haha... thats what i thought
- vspazv, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I use Carbon Copy Cloner http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html
Its a 'donation-ware' utility that lets you create/restore an image of your drive and it resets the file permissions so it will boot correctly after a restore. - streak, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1How reliable is this approach if your system crashes during the backup or if the client and the backup systems both happen to crash?
If your system (or just some of your files) happened to get corrupted and you didn't realize it until much later, how would you revert to an uncorrupted version? - whiteV6, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1aaaa The script that he give for backing up programs, how and where do you get it to run?????
Thanks - FluffyArmada, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2tar -cvjpf backup.tar.bz2 ~kyle/Documents ~kyle/Music ~kyle/Movies ~kyle/Photographs && cp backup.tar.bz2 /Volumes/iPod/ &&
Once a week, and I'm usually good to go. :)
I don't like Stuffit by the way, it always corrupts my files. :-( - FluffyArmada, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1lol... what? I'm wasn't trying to be sarcastic or rude. But unless I am mistaken, the backup can end up corrupted like you said in any kind of backup. You just cross your fingers and hope nothing really bad happens. I don't think there is a "right" way to backup. I'm not trying to say my way is better. :(
EDIT: Or maybe I misunderstood and that wasn't suppost to be a mean comment at me. :-) - streak, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1For a soft discussion from a year ago of whether DVDs are archival quality, see
http://www.pcworld.com/howto/article/0,aid,120833,00.asp - grapetonic, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Yes but does that even matter in this case? If it was someone I knew, and that person deleted some very valuable data, I would have told him/her to not use the hard drive and ship it to me. Or stop using the hard drive and buy a new and wait until you or her visit each other.
- streak, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I'm just trying to get people to think clearly about the subject. The methodology described in the article is certainly simple but it is not the "best" when it comes to reliability. I thought you described the situation quite appropriately, with "you're screwed". One could take extraordinary measures with backups, but with just a bit more effort, a much higher degree of reliability (and functionality) can be achieved.
Regular disk integrity checks and repairs, incremental backups, periodic full backups, rotating media, off-site storage, and mock recovery exercises. (Maybe someone else has more to add?) These procedures will ensure much greater reliability while also allowing older versions of documents to be recovered if necessary.
No offense was intended. - mpc72, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1tar and rsync work wonders. Combine those with a nightly cron job and a shell script and you don't even need to worry about backing up yourself.
- drycounty, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Backup 3 does one thing that no other backup utility (as far as I can tell) does: it will allow you to SPAN disks, whether they are CD or DVD. I just burned my 10k song MP3 collection to DVD in April. Took a lot of DVDs!
- grapetonic, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1My question is: why didn't he just use a data recovery tool to recover his sisters pictures? As long as the hard drive works it's no biggie to recover the data.
- rspeed, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1CCC is donationware as of a few months ago.
- rspeed, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1You've obviously never had a hard drive die on you. Yours are famous last words.
People who use their computers for actual work are tempting fate by not creating a backup plan and sticking to it. Sure, losing your iTunes library wouldn't be a big deal... but what about the thousands of photograps that exist nowhere but on my computer? What about all the code which I've spent hundreds of hours writing?
To paraphrase Chuck Palahniuk:
Over a long enough timeline, the survival rate for every drive drops to zero. - unusualFall, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I enjoy using rsyncbackup: CLI-based backup to rsync specific source directories/files to local drives or remote servers, etc. http://rsyncbackup.erlang.no/
And you may want to grab rsyncX to back up those resource forks (the link in the rsyncbackup documentation is now incorrect; new link: http://archive.macosxlabs.org/rsyncx/intro.html ) - mcbesq, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1What am I wrong about? FlameWar is a fun game because of its simplicity.
I was being sarcastic. I'm ACTUALLY planning on getting the MacBook. I am waiting for the odd-ball bugs to be worked out of the first batch.
I do care about both style and dependability. I have a Fujitsu LifeBook. I have it skinned.
MacZealotry and the iNtifada it creates creeps me out. The MacBook has a few unresolved issues but is otherwise a good machine.
All of my statements are accurate and true. - neondiet, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@samdu
There's nothing wrong with using a second hard drive as a backup device, it just needs to be bigger than your source drive so that you can take multiple full and incremental backups. For a home user I would recommend you take a full backup once a fortnight, and a few incrementals in between, and delete any older than 2 months. - Ilyanep, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Triple digg. I am planning on getting a MacBook Pro 17" sometime this year and dualbooting with Mac OS X and WinXP. Now I can always find a way to backup/restore WinXP cause I've been doing it for forever, but Mac OS X is a new animal to me.
Here's what I probably will do:
1) Do all of the suggestions this guy has for Mac OS X (minus Gmail, my emails aren't that important to me). Copy all of the backups to my current desktop which will become mostly empty as I'm moving about 40 minutes away and the desktop is staying home.
2) Make either an image of my Windows XP installation or just a copy of MyDocs (an image might be less practical at that point, because I'll probably use OS X for my primary OS minus gaming at that point). Copy that to my current desktop as well. - chmilar, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Just get an external hard drive and Retrospect Express. Easy, painless, and it has saved me a few times.
- Diganta, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Never mind my earlier question. I can see from the video http://www.apple.com/dotmac/backup.html . That one can save to an external disk as well. Seems like there is a way to use Apple's Backup software without the .Mac account as well, according to this website. http://www.drijf.net/dototto/ . I haven't tried it myself. I've used Carbon Copy Cloner to an external FW harddrives to backup or reload Macs in my department, which is free for educational use.
- regeya, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Apple's release of rsync is slightly buggy -- but I won't explain, since I'm sure you know all about that.
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