We've all heard about the importance of having backups and we all believe that they are not empty words of advice. However, a lot of people add that to their lists of things that need to do one day and procrastinate for far too long on this. Sadly, those who are most diligent about backups are those that have previously suffered loss as a result of a catastrophic hard drive failure and had no backups. 1Password has a built in backup method but by default it uses the same hard drive as the main data file. This protects you against file loss but not against a drive failure. You can change this in the 1Password preferences.
However, today I want to talk about a more complete and whole disk backup stategy.
Most of us know about Time Machine which was included in Leopard. Time Machine is a fantastic method for backing up the various iterations of files across a long period of time. When you make an oops and need last week's version of a document, Time Machine is your solution. However, for routine and regular backups of your entire hard disk, Time Machine falls short. Also, Time Machine does not make a bootable backup that you can use in the event of a total hard drive failure.
Enter Super Duper from Shirt Pocket software. Super Duper lets you schedule fully bootable backups of your entire hard drive. I have my scheduled to run while I am sleeping and its smart update feature means it only backups up what has changed since the last backup. Disk Utility and Carbon Copy Cloner are other options but Super Duper is the best in my book.
With the software covered, you'll now need some hardware to backup the data to and external firewire drives are what you are looking for. There are tons of great vendors but I particularly like the Mini-Stacks from Other World computing as they have a small stackable footprint and give you some more firewire and USB ports. If you have FW800 ports available on your Mac then go that route otherwise the FW400 on the Mini-Stack V2 are sufficient. You'll want to buy two of them. Get one the same size as your current hard drive for use with Super Duper. Since Time Machine can continue to grow the size of the backup you'll want to get a larger drive for its use. For example, if you have a 250GB drive in your Mac then you might consider getting a 250GB drive for Super Duper and 500GB drive for Time Machine. End result is this:
The power of this solution is that you now have two backups of your data. One that is easy to access for incremental file changes and one that can be restored in the event of a total loss. (in addition to being fully bootable --- think clone) The cost of this solution using the hard drives above and the earlier mentioned software will set you back around $350 U.S. although you can probably get that down a bit with alternate drives. However, is all of the data on your Mac and the time it would take to re-create it worth it? I think the answer is going to be yes in most cases. Please implement a backup strategy as soon as possible if you have not already done so. If not this one, but one of your own choosing but I please backup. You'll be glad you did in the event of a loss.
