The Wirecutter:
When was the last time you backed up all your important documents and photos? Last month? Last year? Never? Everyone should back up their data, but setting up a good backup system can seem time-consuming and intimidating. As a result, some people (including me) put off this daunting task indefinitely, hoping nothing goes wrong. Rather than stress out or delay it any longer, take 15 minutes and set up a system that will back up your files automatically—both to an external drive and to encrypted cloud storage—without any regular action from you. Let’s get it done!
There’s never a time when you should put off doing backups. I did a few months ago and sure enough, I had a hard drive crash and lost months worth of data.
Time Machine is great for most users, but Cloud backups are what everyone really needs. Crashplan/Backblaze whatever. It is cheap. Crashplan is great if you have more than one computer, their family plan lets you backup 10 computers for $150 a year. Linux/Windows/Mac.
Also, if you are an education user and have an “unlimited” google account, you can use something like ARQ to backup to that or Amazon or whatever.
Cloud backups are a great supplement, but not a replacement.
I use Backblaze and I love it overall, but it is much slower than local backup (e.g., backing up 1 TB data could take a month or more) and many ISPs cap bandwidth.
Make sure you have double redundancy whatever your strategy is. Not a single backup path. And test your backups occasionally.
It pays off.
Agreed, and I agree with Mo and nutmac. What I do is this:
1) Local Time Machine/Capsule (use Capsule if you’re bad about plugging in an external drive).
2) Clone a bootable image of your drive (Carbon Copy Cloner, etc). Internal drive fries? On deadline and NEED to finish some stuff in the next few hours/day? Plug this in and boot from it.
3) Backblaze etc so you have up to the hour, offsite backups. Especially needed if you work away from your primary office a lot. Even if you don’t, this backs things up offsite and really is more about disaster recovery.
If you plug in the drives used for the first two via USB hub and then plug that into the Mac, you can have the cloning run on a schedule (middle of the night) so it’s reasonably current and then, in the event of the internal drive failing, get the files you need from Backblaze, etc if they’ve changed since the drive was last cloned.
P.S. If you’re tired of fighting with Time Machine, Arq Backup with something like Amazon Cloud Drive is a nice alternative.
Two things about this…
1) Much of that terabyte etc is probably fairly static – music, images etc. Put it somewhere else (i.e. a external drive in a safe deposit box, etc). I stuffed all of that kind of thing in Glacier storage on AWS.
2) Configure Backblaze, etc to exclude that from backup.
What fight?
I think both SuperDuper! and Time Machine are terrific and it’s useful to use them both.
I made a “homemade” Time Capsule with a new AirPort Extreme and an external HD (not all HDs work for this) and it’s been working perfectly for quite a while. Never fails.
https://richardsnotes.org/2016/02/21/update-on-home-made-time-capsule/
I have three SuperDuper disks: two HDDs for home, swapped daily with one in a firebox in the basement, and one SSD for travel.
The nice thing about Time Machine as opposed to a mirrored backup like Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper is that if you find that your system or an application has become corrupt, you can go back in time and correct things. This is impossible unless you make a week’s worth of cloned backups.
But, it really doesn’t matter all that much what folks use, just that they use something and use it daily.
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i’m feeling with you, Shawn. i also put off doing backups, because of too much work at the time (i have to back up large video projects on LTO tapes, so time machine doesn’t cut it), and sure enough had my first hard drive crash in about 10 years. only lost one small project, though, but that was still an extra week of unpaid work.