Journal
Slugging it out with backup solutions
- Posted on: July 20, 2006
- In: Personal
- Comments closed
Last May, I became paranoid about backing data up and opted into a buying a Linksys NSLU2 with which I could stick a hard drive in the back and all my worries would be sorted. Right? Well, not quite.
A couple of nights ago I had a gut-wrenching moment when I thought I’d lost all my digital photos and music. Panic turned to grit determination to sort this problem out. I’ve had too much experience of losing important data to let this slip again.
A sick Slug
Let me backtrack a little. The problem originally arose the other night when I couldn’t connect to the Slug (as the NSLU2 is affectionally known in the Linux community). Hmmm, not a problem, sometimes it happens and it’s normally sorted with a quick restart. Not on this occasion. I tried and tried but it turned out there seemed to be a problem with the Slug’s firmware. It needed to be upgraded. This is when things went from bad to worse.
The Slug, being Linux and all, formats it’s attached drives in the ext3 format, which can’t be read by a Mac. I needed to get the data off the old hard drive in order to back it up first. I did finally manage to connect to it, but copying turned out to be a complete nightmare - it took over two days to copy 50Gb of data. Two days! Even then it didn’t work correctly. I had to rethink my strategy.
Thank the Lord for Bootcamp
I opted for buying another drive with a quick visit to PC World which I then plugged that directly into the Mac. Oh, did I mention I now own an Intel 20” iMac? Because if I didn’t, or didn’t own a Windows machine, I’d be up shit creek right about now. So, I decided I needed to install in the new firmware in the Slug, but I could only do this with a special utility and on a PC. No worries, as I’m running Bootcamp with XP and that all worked fine amazingly. New firmware installed and a happy Slug again. Copying across to the new USB drive in Windows, from the old drive attached to the Slug proved to be much quicker than OS X. So, over went all the data and I breathed a sigh of relief.
Now it was time to think about how I’m going to be backing up all this data. I needed a good synchronisation solution, rather than an archiving system so after a couple of recommendations I opted for Chronosync.
I’ve set up shares on both drives:
On the new drive:
- Media
- Mark
- Emma
On the backup drive:
- Media_backup
- Mark_backup
- Emma_backup
Then, it’s simply a case of syncing the two which run on a nightly schedule. The beauty of syncing the data is it will only copy over what has been changed (new, edited or deleted). I’m just copying over the backed up files now to the new Media share ready to set up the first sync to run throughout the course of the day.
Lessons learnt
There’s a few things I’ve learnt over the past couple of days:
- Hardware is cheap. A 320Gb Toshiba drive from PC World was under a ?100.
- Backing up is really important. The thought of losing all my holiday photos from Australia nearly made me spew.
- Hard drive problems and resulting stress leads to insomnia. I’ve been up doing this since 5am this morning. Either that or it’s the medication I’m on.
So, please, learn from my pain and tiredness over the past few days. Sort your backup proceedures out. Yes, it’s boring, tiring an tedious and can be expensive, but it really will pay off.
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I'm a graphic designer from near Cardiff in the UK. I've been a designer for over ten years now and primarily work on the web. I'm still partial to a bit of print every now and then though. I used to work for Agency.com in London as an Art Director before working as a Senior Designer for the BBC in sunny Cardiff. This was all before I took leave of my senses and formed my own design consultancy, Mark Boulton Design Ltd.
I've got a thing about grids and typography and occasionally ramble on about them to anyone who will listen.
Mark Boulton Design
If you're after simple, clean and effective web design; let me know.
Comments
Ah Mark, your post remind me to backup my previous project. I usually backing up the file to CD’s.
Kuswanto
Thu 20th Jul 2006
at 6:48 am
Chronosync is pretty good, but watch out for updates to the app/OSX.
SuperDuper! is also great. Get another hard drive and clone your main system every week/two weeks/as required. Complete system backups have never been easier. I nearly learnt the hard way too after the HD just died suddenly. It’s not pleasant.
Simon Clayson
Thu 20th Jul 2006
at 7:40 am
I’ve had similar worries before, but being even more paranoid, I also worry about people stealing my hardware. If this was to happen, the backup drive would go too. I ended up using a flickr pro account for my fullsize photos as its unlimited storage.
Then I use http://mozy.com for online backup (free for 2GB) which is usually enough for the really important stuff. I can’t say I’ve tried any restores yet, but I feel a lot safer.
The only thing left as a storage problem is music. I have a suspicion the correct way to deal with that is the music ‘rental’ model like napster or something, but I haven’t looked into it too much. It seems like my PC will end up being a very thick, thin client!
inoodle
Thu 20th Jul 2006
at 7:44 am
Yep, we invested in a LaCie 250Gb firewire drive a while ago. I partitioned it using OSX disk utility and use Carbon Copy Cloner to make clones of both our Powerbook and iMac G5 drives and keep the 3rd partition for Apple backup - backups. I’d really prefer offsite backup but we’re metered on traffic by ISP’s in Australia so the current online backup services aren’t an option for us.
Damien
Thu 20th Jul 2006
at 10:27 am
Add the factor that it 33c in the office and the pc are melting… BACKUP..
Blow a fuse yesterday it was that hot..
Gabs
Thu 20th Jul 2006
at 11:19 am
We back up by using a removable rack in pc and dvd burner, its simple to add and remove new hdd with ease.
For files we want to keep the hdd is removed and kept in a cupboard or burnt to dvd away from PC!
Rule of thumb keep on top of your files, make regular backups of the ones you care about and never keep all eggs in one basket ;-)
Chef
Thu 20th Jul 2006
at 11:27 am
Almost forgot to mention
Google might be able to help soon..
Will be interesting if the Gdrive goes ahead
Full report here
http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/004097.html
Gabs
Thu 20th Jul 2006
at 11:29 am
I bought a 320GB Western Digital recently and have made a partition the same size as my PowerBook on it and use SuperDuper to clone the drive there. I had to send my computer off to get worked on, so I had my entire system available for use while it was gone, which was sweet.
Nathan
Thu 20th Jul 2006
at 12:10 pm
Pretty much the same here - Clone backups of main drive and all important work files on an external which I copy tunes and photos to as a 2nd back-up.
I also use SMARTreporter (http://homepage.mac.com/julianmayer/) to keep an eye on my HD and warn me if its likely to go down so I can nip it in the bud before disaster strikes!
Paul
Thu 20th Jul 2006
at 1:16 pm
Mark, if I were you, I’d still be worried. You now have a pretty sweet solution that’s comparable to RAID. If any single component goes, you’ve still got all of your data.
But all it takes is both components to go at the same time (lightning strike, fire, theft, etc) and you’ve still lost everything.
I’d be thinking about storing copies of everything you really care about in some offsite solution, even if it’s as lo-fi as buying another external disk and dropping it around a friend’s house.
Mark Norman Francis
Thu 20th Jul 2006
at 3:59 pm
You know Mark, I had thought about that. It’s the last step, but always the most time-consuming. In addition to being just plain difficult to remember to do! I’ve thought about online storage, but I’m not sure it’s ideal as it could cost me an arm and a leg for the amount of data I need to keep on top of - especially using print size files.
Hmmm, there are rumours of GDrive from Google, but I’m not sure I should hang around for that. Like you say, maybe another external hard drive, with everything dumped on it and given to a friend might be the way to go. Although you’ve always got to remember to pick it up and then do that back up and then drop it off again…
Mark Boulton
Thu 20th Jul 2006
at 4:05 pm
Get a cheap old computer and ask to set it up as an online backup server at a friends house. Buy a good large drive for it and you’re all set. Or set it up at work like me, and backup both ways.
Espen
Thu 20th Jul 2006
at 8:32 pm
Syncronizing is one important part of backing up. But the second part is having an archive of backups. Because the moment one or more files get corrupted on your main machine and an exact clone of those is made the same day, you still loose your data.
Having an archive of backups from a day, week or month ago (maybe even longer) makes sure you can always go back. You don’t need full backups, as that would take too much space, but incremental archives with only the changes.
Matthijs
Sat 22nd Jul 2006
at 7:46 am
Hi Mark,
Not sure what everyone here thinks about the way I back things up as it hasn’t even been mentioned which surprises me.
I use Retrospect and have been for over 10 years now. I have never ONCE lost a file and can still get hundreds of Gigabytes of data back from those 10 years back. I am using DVD-RAM discs which I feel are much more superior to standard DVDs and simply could not live without it. I can also start a backup and leave it going or if I don’t have enough time to finish it there and then can stop it and continue at a later date and it will remember where I had got up to.
Also when I get something back off from years ago and make a slight change to it then only the changes get written to disc. The catalog of files is also compressed so that you can fit a whole lot more onto a DVD than you normally would as well.
Never ONCE have I lost ANY information in the 10 years I have been using it and would absolutely recommend this solution to anyone.
I myself have used Chronosync, in fact I even went and purhase a license at one point and I have also tried out probably every single other product out there whether freeware, shareware or a fully paid product and none have even come close.
Definitely do not want to sound like I work for them or anything but in my mind I will never ever use another piece of software for backing up for as long as I live, that is as long as they continue making it!!
I simply don’t believe in using other drives at all for backup probably mainly because I have never done it that way but also I have had a couple of drives lost in the past due to lightning strikes. Unfortunately even my trusty old Macs at that point (some 7 or so years ago) couldn’t survive that.
Hope this helps someone out there.
Best wishes,
Mark
Mark Bowen
Sat 22nd Jul 2006
at 9:09 am
Hi Mark
A simple cost effective but powerful back up piece of software you may like to look at is called:
D?j? Vu
We use it at work to back up everything from our Work in Progress files to our emails. Haven’t had a problem yet.
The best thing about it is that it’s FREE with Toast. Alternatively you can purchase it from:
http://propagandaprod.com
Hope this helps
G :)
??
Graham Sanders
Mon 24th Jul 2006
at 10:27 am
interestingly enough, i’ve just started with having a more organised mini backup system (involving my old PIII running linux, crammed with harddrives, and cwRsync http://www.itefix.no/cwrsync/ on my main windows machine - which i still start manually, but reasonably regularly).
patrick h. lauke
Mon 24th Jul 2006
at 3:21 pm