Since I’ve started running Leopard the backup situation on my computer systems has gotten much better. It’s not just that Apple has created a slam-dunk solution in Time Machine (trust me it rocks). Or even that Time Machine is a complete backup solution (it isn’t). But that Time Machine has inspired me to get all my ducks in a row.
For starters there are two computers I use regularly: my Macbook Pro, and the household server running FreeBSD. Until I installed Time Machine, neither had a consistent (or even existent) backup strategy. In my mind, a backup strategy must handle three situations:
- accidental deletions
- hardware failure
- site disaster
Since installing Leopard, a clear backup strategy has started to evolve, it’s still not complete, but here’s a table listing I’m dealing with the three aspects of backup/recovery on my two main machines.
| Failure | Laptop Solution | Server Solution |
|---|---|---|
| accidental deletion | Time Machine | snapshot |
| hardware failure | Carbon Copy Cloner | RAID-1 |
| site disaster | ??? | ??? |
Cheap hard drives makes the first two failures easy to implement solutions for, I spent less than $350 to acquire almost a terabyte of backup disk. Clearly, I’m still looking for a good solution for off-site backups. If anyone is willing to trade bandwidth I’d be interested in using CrashPlan, but I’m open to other suggestions.
How are you handling off-site backups? Leave me a comment and let me know.