Back It Up Part 1

Slydude

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No matter how reliable your Mac has been, you need a plan for backing up your data. At some point a hard drive will fail, you'll delete an important file or just do something stupid as I did recently. When that happens you'll be glad you had a backup. Lets look at some of the things you need to consider in developing an effective backup strategy. In the second part of the series we'll look at some of the tools available for backing up your Mac.

Archive, Backup, or Clone

Early on in developing a backup plan, you need to think about whether your data needs to be archived, backed up, or ... ... Return to article to continue reading.
 
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Do you think you or someone could make a post of important files on a Mac that everyone should have and should never delete?
Thanks
 
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Slydude

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Do you think you or someone could make a post of important files on a Mac that everyone should have and should never delete?
Thanks

It might take a few of us put something like that together but it's an interesting idea. The files are mostly the same among recent versions of OS X but there are some differences in files and location.

Here's a couple of things that might help in the meantime:
1. There is a System folder at the root level of your hard drive don't remove a file from there unless you know exactly why it needs to be removed. The same goes for the Library folder inside there.

2. There is a Library folder inside your user folder (it's hidden in Lion) you won't need to mess with that often either. If you delete a program and preferences are left behind don't worry about them. They don't generally take up much space or cause problems

3. If Apple places a program (iTunes, iPhoto, etc) in the Applications folder don't move it somewhere else. Once they are moved Software Update cannot update cannot update them till they are put back in their expected places.
 

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To be simple: don't move or touch anything outside of your home (user) folder. You'll also want to be very careful messing around in the user Library folder (this is why it's hidden by default).
 
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yeah not too long ago i was messing with my python folder and may have deleted an old version of it but i think i may be fine cause I haven't had any problems with it.
 

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It depends on what version of Python you deleted. If you deleted the system Python (/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework), you may run into troubles down the line.
 
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It depends on what version of Python you deleted. If you deleted the system Python (/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework), you may run into troubles down the line.
We'll currently in (/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework) I have versions 2.6, 2.7, and 3.2. But in (/Library/Python.Framework/Versions) I have 2.7, 3.0, and 3.2.
 

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I'm not sure why you have Python3 in your System folder - Apple hasn't moved to Python3 yet. Did you symlink the /Library version to /System/Library?

Well, regardless, you haven't deleted them and if you haven't encountered any errors, you might be okay.
 
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I'm not sure why you have Python3 in your System folder - Apple hasn't moved to Python3 yet. Did you symlink the /Library version to /System/Library?

Well, regardless, you haven't deleted them and if you haven't encountered any errors, you might be okay.
Ya I manually downloaded these python versions. Plus everyone with Mac's have encountered problems with 3.0 and 3.2 Python IDLE. So would it be ok if I deleted the 3 versions? And how would you symlink?
 

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The answer to that depends on whether or not you need Python 3. Do you need either of them?

Symbolic links can be created using the ln tool. More info here.
 
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The answer to that depends on whether or not you need Python 3. Do you need either of them?

Symbolic links can be created using the ln tool. More info here.

no i just use 2.7
 
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Great Article - and timely. My entire state seems to be on fire
KOAA.com | Continuous News Coverage | Colorado Springs, Colorado | Pueblo, Colorado
9NEWS.com | Denver | Colorado's online news leader | Breaking news, headlines, weather, sports, business and more.
Consider donating to the Colorado Red Cross
American Red Cross Colorado Chapters - News - News
There are many structures lost to 2 fires - one north near Fort Collins and one in Colorado Springs.

I think one of the key pieces is off site backup. As these fires show - you could be made to evacuate in an instant. You may not have time to even grab your stuff. The online backup is good - if you have the bandwidth to upload that much stuff. It doesn't have to be a pure - backup site like Mozy either. For example - I have a flickr pro account for $25/year - and upload all pictures to Flickr. (I bought an Eye-Fi card which makes it even easier to upload everything to Flickr). I keep most documents in Dropbox so they are always on the cloud and on every device I use.

Another way to backup offsite - is other disks. I keep a USB disk onsite at my work. When I go to the office - I attach it to my computer and run a backup. It isn't as up to date as my home backup but losing a month is better than losing everything. My buddy and I exchange Hard Drives with Pictures on them as another backup. I have a set of his pictures and I give him a set of mine - and we trade disks every now and then and update them.

I've mentioned this before - but another thing you could do is run a raid server - and swap disks periodically. You could put the disks in a safe deposit box or somewhere else off site.

Independent of digital data - another good thing to do is make photocopies of your most important documents and send them to someone you trust. (Birth Certificates, titles, stocks, etc)

EDIT:You're on your own check list
http://bcc.elpasoco.com/Documents/YOYO Reference Sheet.pdf
 
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Great Article - and timely. My entire state seems to be on fire
KOAA.com | Continuous News Coverage | Colorado Springs, Colorado | Pueblo, Colorado
9NEWS.com | Denver | Colorado's online news leader | Breaking news, headlines, weather, sports, business and more.
Consider donating to the Colorado Red Cross
American Red Cross Colorado Chapters - News - News
There are many structures lost to 2 fires - one north near Fort Collins and one in Colorado Springs.

I think one of the key pieces is off site backup. As these fires show - you could be made to evacuate in an instant. You may not have time to even grab your stuff. The online backup is good - if you have the bandwidth to upload that much stuff. It doesn't have to be a pure - backup site like Mozy either. For example - I have a flickr pro account for $25/year - and upload all pictures to Flickr. (I bought an Eye-Fi card which makes it even easier to upload everything to Flickr). I keep most documents in Dropbox so they are always on the cloud and on every device I use.

Another way to backup offsite - is other disks. I keep a USB disk onsite at my work. When I go to the office - I attach it to my computer and run a backup. It isn't as up to date as my home backup but losing a month is better than losing everything. My buddy and I exchange Hard Drives with Pictures on them as another backup. I have a set of his pictures and I give him a set of mine - and we trade disks every now and then and update them.

I've mentioned this before - but another thing you could do is run a raid server - and swap disks periodically. You could put the disks in a safe deposit box or somewhere else off site.

Independent of digital data - another good thing to do is make photocopies of your most important documents and send them to someone you trust. (Birth Certificates, titles, stocks, etc)
Dude i'm right next to you!! I'm on vacation!
 
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The answer to that depends on whether or not you need Python 3. Do you need either of them?

Symbolic links can be created using the ln tool. More info here.

anyway since i only use 2.7 can i delete all the other versions that are under my (/System) and (/Library) folders?
 
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Slydude

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Great Article - and timely. My entire state seems to be on fire
KOAA.co\
First to the important stuff. Until I read your post I had forgotten you were in Colorado. Stay safe.

Glad you enjoyed the article Offsite backup is important. I did not spend a lot of time on the online options due to limited experience with them. Member V6Pony was able to provide some helpful comments via PM.

I like the idea of a RAID for that. haven't played with RAID though I may soon given the number of drive problems. Maybe you should write about the ins and outs of RAIDs in the near future. Some of the descriptions I've read have been either poor or obviously not aimed at the home user.
 

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Offsite backup can be relatively easy for small things as well (one could argue that someone emailing their important documents to their own address is primitive offsite backup). For instance, I've set up cron to backup parts of my school work to Dropbox at a regular interval. It runs a basic shell script that compresses a folder and copies it to my Dropbox folder. Relatively simple compared to full offsite backup but it accomplishes the same goal.
 
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Slydude

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I've thought about doing something similar. I've had iDisk for a long time but never made much use of it due to speed.

I have several files I'd like to put in an encrypted disk image and store online for easy access. Problem is I need it to be accessed from both Mac and Windows. Preferably without third party software though I don't think that is possible.
 

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You could use an ISO image instead of a DMG. ISO images are fully supported by OS X and it's relatively easy to get software that will read them in Windows. Even better, Windows 8 includes native ISO image support.
 
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Slydude

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I mentioned this to someone recently but I think when I did we were talking about using DMG files. I don't know why I didn't think of ISO as a possibility. Thanks.
 
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My family and I are currently safe from the fires - but I have friends in both major burn areas (High Park and Waldo) that are affected. Evacuations and some may have lost their houses already. No one knows quite yet as the burn area in Colorado Springs is too dangerous to get to.

Good info on the ISO. Hadn't thought of that.

I had written up some things on RAID earlier. I may try to consolidate and focus on backup.

Some other places to stash data - again an online distributed strategy is probably good. The more places you have important data - the less chance you have of losing it (i.e. company goes out of business)

dropbox - the gold standard - everything seems to integrate to dropbox nowadays.
www.dropbox.com

box - online - not very well integrated into Desktop OSes. (SugarSync and Dropbox can look like folders on the desktop. Does have an iOS app.
https://www.box.com/

Sugarsync - has a manager just like dropbox for syncing to the deskop. They also have an iOS app that works well. They give you 5GB of space.
https://www.sugarsync.com/

Amazon cloud drive
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/learnmore?tag=macforums0e4-20
5GB Free.

Microsoft Skydrive
https://skydrive.live.com/

Google Drive
https://drive.google.com/

As always - keeping data online is somewhat of a risk so choose carefully how sensitive information is stored there. Consider encryption (the dmg file, an encrypted iso, using tar and gpg) to store sensitive files online. That being said - being online at all is a risk for identity theft so tread lightly whatever you do when putting personal information online.

EDIT: I use GPG to transfer sensitive files as it is available on all major systems. Here is a good article on how to use it with a shared password.
http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/linux-how-to-encrypt-and-decrypt-files-with-a-password.html
You could get really fancy and use shared keys to encrypt/decrypt data.
http://drdatabase.wordpress.com/2010/06/09/gpg-a-quick-howto/
Or use an encrypted password file to share
http://unix.stackexchange.com/quest...em-symetric-encrypting-the-key-is-it-a-normal
 

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