03-06-2008, 09:02 AM

I'm curious about how often people actually do backups of their machine. Everyone knows you should if your data is important but it would be interesting to see how many people really do it regularly.

I've got Time Machine running on my MacBook so as long as the machine is plugged into my external drive via USB (curse you Airport Extreme), it's backed up hourly.

On my PCs I back up key files on a weekly basis. Time Machine's ease of use is making me rethink my personal backup strategies.

03-06-2008, 09:32 AM

Automated - Everything

It's actually *almost* everything. There's one directory containing a Linux ISO that I don't backup.

I too use TM, and it is excellent. There has been the occasion when I needed to recover something, typically one annoying little file, and it's so easy to do with TM. Frankly one should test backups once in awhile. Archiving a file is no good if retrieving it doesn't work.

I have a 500G external I connect to my MB. Most times I let it work automatically. Sometimes however I will command a backup, just because I've done something I don't want to lose.

03-06-2008, 09:36 AM

Never. I currently have one HD. I am eventually going to buy a 2nd 750GB drive and set it up RAID 1 so everything is backed up. Nothing is critical though. It's all just music and movies I already own. If the HD crashed, which has never happened to me in the 10 years I've used a modern omputer, I'd just import everything again.

03-06-2008, 10:01 AM

Originally Posted by mathogre

...Frankly one should test backups once in awhile. Archiving a file is no good if retrieving it doesn't work...

Yeah, I've had firsthand experience with that. Back in '89 I had just started a new gig as an IT director for a software company. We got hit by the Dark Avenger virus hard - ended up infecting nearly every file on our network. So I grabbed the backup tapes that we had been dutifully doing every night and started firing up with restoring software. Turned out it didn't work - at all. Sure, the backups reported that they were working fine but the darn thing couldn't restore ANYTHING. Fortunately we were able to use McAffee to eradicate the virus.

I was nearly eradicated from that job. I installed a new backup system the next day and tested the restores often.

03-06-2008, 11:51 AM

Manual, roughly monthly unless I buy a lot of music or do a lot of work on something. I don't keep my backup drive plugged into my computer. In the event of a fire or theft, I wouldn't want to lose both of them, so automated doesn't really work for me.

03-06-2008, 12:01 PM

Time Machine works well for me. 500GB external drive for a 250GB internal HDD.

03-06-2008, 12:51 PM

Call me paranoid, but I use a combination of remote backup (offsite), Retrospect over the network to a NAS and Time Machine to an external HD.

03-06-2008, 03:16 PM

Backup, whats a backup?

03-06-2008, 03:20 PM

Automated using SuperDuper! every night. While I don't backup EVERYTHING, I make sure that the things I do want backed up are placed in a location that gets backed-up.

I also use Time Machine -- you can't be too safe.

The only thing I'm missing is an off-site backup and if I ever needed that, well, I have other things to worry about than a bunch of files on a computer.

03-06-2008, 03:45 PM

Continuous via Time Machine. Best OS feature ever!

03-06-2008, 03:55 PM

I absoulely would, but havnt had the money for a backup drive lately. I was going to last month. But life came up. Go college!

03-06-2008, 04:53 PM

I manually backup everything once a week.

03-06-2008, 08:09 PM

Mine is semi-automated. I have Time Machine set up, but I have to remember to plug in my external hard drive. I just did right now so it's backing up as we speak.

03-06-2008, 08:34 PM

I've been using Time Machine since Oct. 29th, and was using Carbon Copy Cloner prior to that on my 250GB Seagate external drive.

Every couple months, I delete my old backups on the drive, and then run a fresh backup.

Every month, I make fresh backups of all my invaluable data (Multi-Track master recordings, raw video footage, documents, photos, things I can't replace in the event of loss) on DVD-R and take them to my Grandma's house, 30 minutes from my house in case of natural disaster in my area.

Plus, I've got my OS X DVD ripped to a partition on my external drive in case something happens to my disc, so I think I've got a decent strategy.

03-06-2008, 08:51 PM

Originally Posted by bryphotoguy

Never. I currently have one HD. I am eventually going to buy a 2nd 750GB drive and set it up RAID 1 so everything is backed up. Nothing is critical though. It's all just music and movies I already own. If the HD crashed, which has never happened to me in the 10 years I've used a modern omputer, I'd just import everything again.

Just a side note... RAID 1 isn't a very good backup solution.

Yes, it provides redundancy in the case of drive failure, but the problem with RAID 1 is that unlike an actual backup, it does not create an archive of the data frozen in time and saves it to another storage device.

With a backup if any kind of failure occurs, you can recover from a previous backup version of the data. With a Mirrored RAID 1, all the system changes are applied immediately to all the drives in the array and no archival history is maintained, defeating the purpose of useing RAID 1 as a "backup".

...
To answer the question on the poll, I use Time Machine as much as I can on my MacBook Pro, but also I have a separate external hard drive which I back up my important files one a month, critical files get copied there immediately.