nCity Backup

Picking an appropriate Backup plan:

Meet Roger, former nCity Beta Team member. Roger has a small office on the 20th floor of an ultramodern high-rise here in Grass Valley. Every weekend, Roger goes to his office and checks the company network to make sure security and backup processes that run every night are current and complete. He removes the backup volume (containing a week's worth of daily backups), then takes it to an offsite location and exchanges it for a similar volume from storage. He will repeat this process next week - as he does every week - using the oldest backup volume from offsite to replace the company's current, daily backup volume.: Roger's company has a backup system. Worst case scenario: His company could lose 1 day's records to a destructive computer problem. In the event of a catastrophe affecting the entire office building, up to one week's data might be lost. This is the level of acceptable risk adopted by Roger's company. Roger _could_ run backups offsite via the internet, but he's a hands-on kind of guy and prefers to keep company secure by keeping backups in-house. This routine is the backup strategy he and his company have settled on.
: Having a backup plan is just plain prudent. For most computer users, a secondary hard drive equal to or exceeding storage capacity of hard drive(s) in use will prove the best value in terms of gigabytes-per-dollar and ease of use. Backup frequency (daily, weekly, monthly, etc.) is determined by convenience-versus-risk. Convenience is very important here; the more convenient a backup system is, the more likely it will be used, especially if the process can be automated.
: So, the first question is, how much do you value your work? Roger's files affect thousands of people; daily, offsite, secure and redundant backup is of utmost importance. Your files may represent a great deal of work, too, and they are no less valuable to you.

Which of the following categories fit your situation best?

Category A: Secure, continuous and complete, rotating and redundant, offsite backup. (Roger's company falls into this category.) Recovery from a total disaster will take no longer than a restart from backup volume.
Category B: Automated daily onsite backup; loss of 1 day's work is acceptable risk, but offsite storage is not necessarily an important requirement. If the whole place goes up in smoke, data recovery probably won't be your biggest concern. Fair enough.
Category C: Manual or automated weekly/monthly onsite backup, depending on possible setback from data loss. Bootable backup of entire volume(s) completed according to job schedule. Like category B, life will go in in the face of disaster. Meanwhile, you have a full, viable backup, if needed.
Category D: Backup of specific files only (not entire volume), completed periodically as work progresses. We see many people using this (obsolete) method to preserve work on a day-to-day basis. Long as you're prepared (and equipped) to spend days reconstructing your hard drive and installing/updating/registering software, I suppose this approach is okay. Just know what you'll be up against; reconstructing an entire hard drive from scratch is no small task.
Category F: Backup is too expensive, too much trouble, nothing important enough to backup. Deal with data loss after the fact, willing to start all over again from zip. These are usually people who have (somehow) managed to avoid data loss so far, people who have no idea what it feels like to lose everything in one fell swoop. (Aren't many of these folks left.)

Backup specific files to removable media (category D):: The means by which files arrive on your system might suggest an incremental backup plan using CDs or DVDs - as long as you're willing to reconstruct the drive they resided on (see D above). No small job these days, reconstructing an entire hard drive.

Installed files from removable media including OS and original application disks. The original media is your backup (less updates, of course). Original disks should be stored away in a safe place once their content has been installed on your hard drive, along with serial numbers, passwords and registration information.
Downloads from the Internet, online file transfers and email have no such backup. However, many such files arrive compressed, and it's a simple matter to drag the compressed file to a CD, DVD, or other removable media for backup purposes. By making this a habit, you will always have a (compressed) backup copy of all downloads so you don't have to go searching for them again. eMails and email folders may also be saved to disk using "Save As" from Mail's File menu. (Try it - it's a good way to archive and clean out all that old email, whether your goal is backup or not.)
Original files (including documents, photos, artwork, recordings, etc.) are always one-of-a-kind files that exist nowhere else until you make a backup copy to preserve your work. Removable media might suffice for this task if file size is within limitations imposed by the chosen media. But a better approach is always a full and complete backup of everything, OS, apps and all (more below).

Volume and system backup (category A thru C):: Given the complexity of "system builds" these days, backing up the entire volume - OS, apps, docs, photos, music, emails, bookmarks and everything else - is the best choice by far. Periodic use of a backup utility to clone the entire contents of your hard drive(s) to a secondary volume of equal size (or bigger) will produce a complete, current and bootable backup of every single file. No matter what might happen to the original, you can pick up exactly where you left off last time you executed a backup. We highly recommend Shirtpocket's SuperDuper utility and EMC's Retrospect. Free utilities such as Carbon Copy Cloner are also quite popular and useful.

When Disaster Strikes...: Picking a backup plan that suits you to create and maintain a backup system will minimize loss, allow quick recovery, and permit you to reconstruct your hard drive in the event of a disaster. Once established, your overall system configuration is well worth preserving, so a full backup or volume-to-volume clone is highly recommended. Read on for our recommendations.....

Best defense is a proactive offensive.: The days of backing up individual, specific files - whether videos, photos, graphics, documents, music or whatever - are over. In order to read these files, the application that created them must be onboard, too, along with your Operating System, system extensions and drivers, with all software at appropriate version/update levels. To this end, the only feasible backup strategy these days is to create and maintain a bootable, complete clone of your entire hard drive. The frequency which you choose to perform backup functions is entirely up to you, dependent on the amount of time/data you're willing to sacrifice for the sake of convenience.
: Anyone who has experienced a catastrophic drive failure will tell you: It can take weeks, if not months, just to get back to where you were yesterday. If you're lucky - and you decide it's worth the cost - $2K or so might get you back up and running in the event of a mechanical drive failure. (In the event of data corruption on a still-working drive, we can probably recover your data, but it will still be an unexpected expense.)

First consideration for a backup drive is connectivity.

IDE drive, also known as ATA or PATA

SATA hard drive: The hard drive on left (above) is a good old-fashioned IDE/ATA drive; Note the 40-pin data connector, 10-pin jumper bus (with one white jumper in place), and its 4-pin power connector. These drives were quite common for many years, and far cheaper than the SCSI drives Apple used up until the mid 90s. IDE/ATA drives are sometimes referred to as PATA (parallel ATA) drives, an after-the-fact name derived to distinguish them from newer SATA (serial ATA) drives like the one on the right. These drives have very different connectors and are not interchangeable.
: For older Macs, your choice of backup drives should match the type of drive currently in use, but because SATA drives are the current standard and likely to be so for some time, an SATA drive might be your best option.
: Backup drive capacity (not to be confused with its inflated "size") should be equal to or larger than actual capacity of your original hard drive. In other words, if you have a 250GB hard drive, get a 250GB (or larger) backup volume.

Use FireWire for backup.

Why? Because it's fast (second only to SCSI), and because it will give you the option of startup from a secondary volume. (New Macs may also boot from USB-2, but it's not quite as fast.)

The drive enclosure pictured here is for a standard 3.5" (full-size) hard drive. It has both FireWire and USB ports, requires a power brick (large round port near bottom), and cools by convection. Some enclosure have fans, some are stackable, some are made from plastic and others, like this example, are made of aluminum. All have a bridgeboard which converts ATA or SATA to FireWire and/or USB.

Smaller 2.5" notebook drives also have external enclosures available for use as portable backup. Their advantage is the ability to draw power directly from your Mac's FireWire port, eliminating the need for a power supply.

(Cable shown is a very nice - if expensive - Apple FireWire cable, lightweight and short, available online at the Apple Store.)

FireWire/USB drive enclosure.
Other considerations and options:: If you use a Mac tower, you have extra hard drive bays wired and ready for an internal backup drive. This will protect against the primary concern of a drive failure, but it won't protect you from a fire, flood or other disaster that might destroy the entire machine - only offsite backup can do that. On the up side, your backup drive won't take up any desk space.
: iMacs, Minis and notebooks, of course, have no room for additional internal drives, so an external backup is your only option. If you travel with a notebook, a 2.5" SATA enclosure is your best bet. Small, portable and self-contained, they're easy to pack and use. Otherwise, a desktop box like the one pictured above can stay behind on your desk as a backup volume. (Notebook drives are more expensive than full-size models and are limited in capacity by their size.)
: There is also the option of backing up to a server over the internet, if you don't mind an annual or monthly fee and you're okay with sending all your personal info to an unknown location for storage. A MobileMe account (formerly known as dot-Mac) is cost effective and also allows you to synchronize your address book, emails and other files while on the road. Personally, I'd rather handle backup myself, but these online services seem to be gaining in popularity partly because there's no additional hardware required and partly due to ease of use.

Backup software recommendations:: Starting with the Leopard 10.5 Operating System, Apple has addressed backup by providing their Time Machine software and (wireless) Time Capsule device provide plenty of options and are quite effective, once setup has been completed.
: Other backup options include the excellent long time Mac standard Retrospect program from EMC, a full-featured application which does an outstanding job of copying data even when files may have become corrupted or damaged. Another popular (free) app is Carbon Copy Cloner.
: The program we use here at the shop and highly recommend is called SuperDuper! from Shirt Pocket. It has a clear and easy interface, completely dependable, with an outstanding feature set at a quite reasonable price. (Unregistered version will repeatedly clone a drive to backup, but to achieve its full potential it must be purchased and registered.)

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