A simple Mac backup strategy

They say there are only two kinds of people: those who have lost data and those who are about to. I find that a lot of very sophisticated people in software are in the second category. I am in the first. I thought I’d share my very simple Mac-based backup strategy that I’ve been using for a while. It would be a great new year’s resolution to follow. It follows two important principles:

1. It’s incremental. If you only have time for one thing do item 1. More time, do item 2, etc.
2. It’s automatic. You don’t have to do anything for it to work. Maybe a sanity check every once in a while

I have to say that this strategy is optimized for people with more money than time. You can find much cheaper ways out there, if you value your time really low.

So here it goes:

1. Sign up and configure a general purpose online backup service: I use Mozy, but they abound. Don’t waste too much time, though. Mozy costs $50/yr, works well on Mac (despite some higher CPU craziness every once in a while), and most importantly, there is a huge company behind it, EMC. I trust that my data won’t be lost or stolen. In my setup, I use Mozy to backup documents, mostly. Under my Home/Documents/ directory there is a n “Archive” and “Archive NOT” folder, and anything that is under “Archive” is in Mozy. The implicit contract is that if it is under Archive, it is safe, otherwise, it’s not.
2. Buy an external Firewire drive and set up SuperDuper: This little Mac gem makes it a breeze to clone your computer’s hard drive. An exact mirror. You use a Firewire connected-drive because it’s the simplest way to get back on track. If your laptop drive fails, you simply hold the ALT key, then select your external drive. If you no longer have your laptop (e.g: you left it on a plane), you get a new laptop and boot in Firewire Target disk mode. In this second case, you would probably worry as much about who has your data now and the answer to that problem is FileVault, but I don’t recommend messing with it unless you’re ready for complexity at recovery time.
3. Set up Time Machine. Time Machine is great for recovering versions of documents, and for managing complex files, such as the iTunes and iPhoto libraries. For me, the key to a simple Time Machine set up is to exclude a ton of useless directories from it and focus on the documents you will want to recover. In addition, I recommend backing up with Time Machine over wi-fi. This makes it super-easy for Time Machine to do its best work of having very recent versions of your documents. I like Time Capsule and Drobo with Drobosharefor this very reason.
4. Create custom backup strategies for specific types of data. I use Soocial and Google Contacts for contact syncing, a plain-old network share and some Chronosync jobs for copying iPhoto and iTunes libraries.

One final observation: there is a perillous time in the life of a new document, before you save it for the first time. I have lost more documents in this manner than in any other way. The best advice I can offer about this is to a) avoid bad document editors such as an HTML form, or an outdated blog editor such as Ecto, and b) stick to quality editors that will save your work as you progress, such as TextMate