Filed under: Software, Productivity, Tips and tricks
Have You Backed-up Today?
There's nothing worse that losing data from a failed hard drive. It's why so many people so strongly recommend backing up your data. If you don't have a backup routine in place, start one today. The old adage "it's not if, but when" applies here. If you haven't had a HD failure yet, you will some day and then that backup will start looking mighty handsome.Fortunately, there are a number of backup solutions for Mac OS X: Carbon Copy Cloner, SuperDuper, RsyncX, Retrospect, Sychronize Pro, just to name a few. Even Apple offers a program called Backup with their .Mac service. They all work with varying degrees of complexity. Some of these are even free.
If you're new to the idea of backing up, I suggest reading Matt Henderson's excellent write-up about how he backs up computers at his workplace. I use a similar set up to back up my data at home.
Most hard drives shipped in the last several years have built into them a technology called S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology). It allows the hard disks to self-monitor several important attributes of a disk and report back to the end-user if something's about to fail. Most disk utiility programs now will tell you if a S.M.A.R.T. test has failed, including Disk Utility, TechTool Pro, and DiskWarrior. S.M.A.R.T. is great but doesn't help you if you don't actively look to see if a S.M.A.R.T. test is failing. Here's where I use a menubar application called SMARTReporter. It lives in your menubar and will, quite simply, warn you if a S.M.A.R.T. test has failed by turning its icon red instead of green.
It can also be set to send you an email if it detects a S.M.A.R.T. failure. I run this on several servers I maintain.
Tell us about your backup routines, or your horror stories? What recommendations do you have for backup software, or which do you think readers should avoid?
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Eric J said 3:09PM on 11-02-2005
it's be nice if the "no problem" state were black instead of green. it's a little thing, but isn't attention to little things what makes OS X so great?
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Damien Barrett said 3:27PM on 11-02-2005
One of the program's preferences allows you to use a grey icon set instead of the red/green scheme.
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Steve Akers said 3:29PM on 11-02-2005
I have an external hard drive that is the same size as my internal drive. Carbon Copy Cloner wakes up once a week to keep them both in synch. I also recommend making your backup drive bootable. Something happened on my internal drive once that screwed it up big time. I simply booted from the backup and cloned it back onto my internal drive. It worked like a charm.
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Chuck Lapuck said 3:38PM on 11-02-2005
Cool Stuff.
Just want to point out that s.m.a.r.t monitoring is not always that reliable. About two months ago my hard drive started making some strange noises and the smart condition became "failing". I was out of cash (its really not cheap having the hdd changed in a powerbook!) and just said "ok, I'll do daily backups and see how long before my hdd dies completely". Anyway, it's now running fine (no noise and smart status "verified"), and I don't plan to change my hdd any time soon! (but I still do the daily backups heh).
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marc cardwell said 3:59PM on 11-02-2005
at work, we use retrospect for daily incremantal backups. from what i've seen, superduper and ccc DON'T do incremantal backups, they clone.
for my home macs, i'd like to find an effective, shareware app to do incremantal backups. any reccomendations?
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Andy Bennett said 4:01PM on 11-02-2005
I use a client calles "Chronosync" by Econ Technologies. It's pretty flexible, programmable, and full-featured. Granted, I've not used many other clients, but I'm happy with Chronosync.
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spiralscratch said 4:03PM on 11-02-2005
If you want some really detailed SMART info, get smartmontools
http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/
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Mark H said 4:10PM on 11-02-2005
Interesting timing on this article, since my hard drive failed yesterday afternoon!
I'd known something was wrong for about a week, since the drive had been making unusual sounds, and in the last four days OS X froze (hard reboot required) on me at least a dozen times. I'll echo the earlier comment that the SMART status is not very reliable, as it still indicated that the drive was fine when I checked it an hour before the drive died completely. After it died I used Disk Utility from the Tiger install disk and it confirmed that the drive was in fact toast.
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random said 4:12PM on 11-02-2005
I back up my important information daily (bookmarks, mail, stickies, contacts) to the iDisk using Backup 3.
One day my Stickies database just winked out. And I keep a lot of info in my stickies. It's my most favorite Apple app. I retrieved my backup with a few clicks and continued where I left off.
I have no pity for the people who don't make regular backups of their data and subsequently lose it. Maybe it's because they don't expect their computers to fail...but computers are devices and even the most reliable system can be brought to its knees by outside sources.
My parents had a computer fry due to brownouts after Hurricane Rita. Surge Protector bars protect against sudden surges but can't really help with flickering or dirty power. If it had caused the HD to crash hard, all of their files would have been toast. (Fortunately, I had backed up their Documents folder a month ago to CDs) They bought a UPS backup a few days after replacing out the power supply.
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Joshua Elgin said 4:31PM on 11-02-2005
What is that calendar icon in your menu bar?
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Damien Barrett said 4:47PM on 11-02-2005
No. 8, that calendar icon is from Now Up-to-Date v5.0.4.
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Zach Everson said 4:50PM on 11-02-2005
I'm having a horror story rightr now. I upgraded to Missing Sync 5.0 (see my comments in that post) and lost all of my addresses and IM addresses in Address Book. I'm trying to restore Address Book from my iDisk (I run backup every Friday), but Backup is unable to locate the data. I might have just lost 250 addresses.
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Daren said 5:11PM on 11-02-2005
Just yesterday I had a harddrive failure on my Powerbook 15inch. What really bummed me out was that I just got my iPod (video) in the mail and now I can't sync up my playlists and such because they're all gone. Fortunately I back up my school work on my shuffle daily, and backed up other files (pictures, music) a month ago.
But now I have to be laptopless for a week to install a new harddrive in, not to mention doing an re-install of everything.. bah!
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Aaron said 5:48PM on 11-02-2005
I am still grumpy about Apple not offering Backup 3 for download or for sale seperate from .mac. I have no use for iDisk or any of the other .mac options. I just want Backup 3 :)
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tnkgrl said 5:54PM on 11-02-2005
Disk Utility + external FireWire hard drive + discipline = weekly bootable backup
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systemsboy said 6:06PM on 11-02-2005
I also use ChronoSync, though not for backups. More for sync-ing folders between portable drives and home and work computers. I honestly don't do religious backups of my home systems. I do, however, make backups of staff machines where I work. These are done using a command-line tool called rsync. If you're scared of the command-line, rsync may not be for you, but it has several advantages over many other utilities:
1) It's free and included with Mac OSX
2) It works with compression over a network
3) It can be automated with shell scripts and cron
4) It does incremental and mirror backups
I don't know if rsync can clone a bootable system (I think it can). But if you're willing to spend some time in the Terminal, it's great for user data backups.
NOTE: The Tiger version of rsync will handle resource forks, as long as the rsync version matches between systems. Pre-Tiger, resource-for-aware versions of rsync can be found at versiontracker.
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Steve said 6:38PM on 11-02-2005
This post inspired me to do a backup of my mac at school. I wanted to back up my files to an external drive, and also wanted to sync my desktop and PowerBook. I really wanted a free program that would do this for me, and found one (that's free for students like me). It's called Synk ( http://www.decimus.net/synk/ ), and it seems to be working fine. It can backup and/or synchronize, and has options for scheduling. Check it out.
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eric said 8:25PM on 11-02-2005
Retrospect is unquestionably the best product out there - especially given it's cross platform support - we've got it running on many mac, windows, and linux servers backing up to a couple terrabytes worth of disk space. Unfortunately, it's expensive. I've also heard good things about BackJack (www.backjack.com) but that's also a pay service, with a setup fee, etc. But to be frank, a complete hard drive failure is not necessarily the end of your data - if you've got the bucks, and you like to gamble, there are quite a few companies that'll bring your drive into a clean room, crack it open and load the platters into their own equipment and get the data back to you, but at a cost usually much greater than the cost of Retrospect or a backup service. Drive Savers (drivesavers.com) is one of the best that I've heard of (but their services start at about $600).
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Henry said 9:39PM on 11-02-2005
Carbon copy cloner does have a sync option that I use to make regular backups. I think you have to install another program for the sync option to be available.
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Navstar said 9:52PM on 11-02-2005
I highly recommend Deja Vu. It's a System Pref that can automate Daily, Weekly, and Monthly backups.
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