I’m going to take you on a journey through my paranoia about losing all of the precious “stuff’ I have accumulated through my years of computer use. All of this stems from a massive hard drive failure I had in college when I lost every single one of my pictures and music files that I’ve had since I started using a computer. It took months and many different trips to various computer shops to recover just a fraction of the data I lost and ended up costing me lots more than a backup solution would have. Why is it that we never learn the cardinal rule of computing until it’s too late? BACK UP YOUR STUFF!!

First, let me give you a picture of how I store my information and where I store it. time-machine-iconCurrently on my computer I have less than 100gigs worth of pictures, applications with their support files, manuals, personal documents and other media. That internal drive is automatically backed up via Time Machine to a 500GB external. I have always had more video and music files than would fit on a standard laptop hard drive so I typically store those on an external drive. My drive of choice right now is an amazing OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro 750GB external drive that I picked up about 18 months ago when I made the switch to Apple. It is blazing fast, super reliable and works excellent with Final Cut. I keep my iTunes library (currently 70,000 songs and counting left over from the DJ’ing days), my Final Cut scratch folder, my finished edited videos and all of my DVD’s I’ve burned to watch at my desk on there. You can see why that external drive is so important to me.

When I switched to a Mac, I was thrilled to finally have Time Machine to automatically take care of backing up my computer for me. Until recently, I’ve fortunately, never had to use it but after a hard bump to my laptop that left me unable to boot OSX, I had to restore my internal hard drive from scratch. Six hours later and a whole work day down the tubes, I realized that the Time Machine backup is great for making sure I don’t delete anything I really need but for getting me back up and running with little downtime, it wasn’t the best. I also realized that although I keep my important media on the external drive, that one is bound to have an expiration date like all other hard drives but I had no way of recovering those files once they were gone!  That combined with the thought of upgrading to snow leopard got me thinking.

Time for an overhaul of my backup routine. I’ll walk you through how I did it…

Level One: Time Machine

I still think Apple’s Time Machine is a great utility. Having it run in the background and give me hourly backups of the EXACT state of my computer at that moment is phenomenal. I also love that i can go back and find that one file I never should have deleted. For casual computer users, I think this is all you need. Typically, taking your computer offline for a few hours while Time Machine restores your drive shouldn’t hurt you. For those of us who live on our computers for work though, time lost is money lost. My setup lends itself to another problem as well, what happens if my external drive crashes? I wouldn’t have a way to restore that at all. I needed something more

Level Two: Mirrored Backups

I had to think of a solution to have a bootable backup so that if my internal drive should fail, I could boot from the other drive like nothing ever happened. Once I had finished my workday, I could then deal with the dead drive and restore it using either time machine or copy the backup drive back to the original internal drive. This solution also allows me to have a clone of my external media drive in case (god forbid) anything should happen to that, I would have a full backup of it ready to roll.

To accomplish this I needed to get a large enough drive to hold every piece of digital information I own. I went back to OWC and purchased a 2TB Mercury Elite-AL Pro Quad interface (it had to be firewire because you can only boot from a firewire connected drive, USB won’t work). I partitioned that out to 500GB (double the space of my internal drive) and 1500GB (double the size of my external drive) respectively. I then use Carbon Copy Cloner to make a block by block clone of my internal drive and my external drive to their respective partitions on that drive once every week. If I ever need to use that information faster than I can restore it in Time Machine, I know it is all contained on that one, bootable, massive hard drive.

Level Three: Worst Case Scenario

Say something catastrophic were to happen like a natural disaster or someone breaks into my home and steals every piece of technology in my office. What would I want to make sure is safe and where would I keep it? The items I chose to make sure are always safe are my Preferences folder (located under your home folder/library/preferences) my 1Password database (home folder/library/application support/1Password) which stores every password I have and all of my bank account information, my task manager of choice, “Things“, database (~/library/application support/Cultured Code, my Evernote database (/library/application support/Evernote) and my Delicious Library database (~library/application support/Delicious Library) so I have a record of what I had before it was stolen for insurance.

I back up each one of these individual files to two places (just to be sure). The first place they are backed up to every day is my MobileMe iDisk with the complimentary Backup3 software. Backup3 makes it incredibly easy to set up an automatic, incremental backup of any files you want and has worked flawlessly. If for some reason MobileMe loses all of my information, I also have Carbon Copy Cloner make a disk image of these same files that I store in my free Dropbox account. The odds of both of these services going down and losing my information after I lost all of my other backups is slim. I’ll have lost all of my pictures, music, video, applications and other awesome data but at least the most important parts are safe.

Level Four: Offsite Storage

I have yet to implement stage four because, to be honest, I feel a little foolish taking it this far. To be 100% sure that all of my data is safe though, I may have to step it up. Level four would involve making a clone of my 2TB drive and storing that some place safe from both theft and natural disasters. Taking it to a relative’s home, storing it in a safe deposit box or placing it inside a fireproof/waterproof safe are all options I’ve considered. I know there are online backup options like Mozy, etc. but for this amount of data, that would take months to do a single backup and restore. Something that I can’t afford to wait for. So for now, I’ll leave my backups at Level Three until I learn the hard way again. Then I’ll step it up to Level Four.

What is your current backup plan?  Is it as secure as you’d like it to be?  Let me know about it in the comments.