...a thing of the past
I was in the dogbox midweek after the second disk head crash in just over a year – because once again I’d been tardy on the backups. This time we lost a month’s worth of photos; and a good deal of Rebecca’s recent Ponoko work, amongst other even more precious and personal stuff.
So basically I can’t trust myself, or anyone else for that matter, to plug in the external hard drive to the MacBook and take a clone using Super Duper on a timely and regular basis. Something even easier had to be found. And that thing is a Time Capsule.
The things are damned expensive, but are nothing short of magic. Basically it just sits on the home wireless network, in the spare room, and every hour the MacBook sends it all the changed files to create a snapshot of the hard disk.
This means that not only do you have a once an hour backup service, but Apple also provide a user interface to go backwards through all the snapshots. So… two months later you work out you deleted a file you now need? Dial back and retrieve it from the Time Capsule.
Unfortunately the out of the box experience wasn’t quite as good as I’ve had with other Apple products – it was a bit hard to get it to work properly on our WiFi network; and our photo printer is still refusing to work when attached to the Time Capsule – but now that backups are working I feel mightily reassured.
The proof will be in the restoration of our data after some future disk failure. And I’ll still keep a disk clone off-site for an extra, paranoid level of protection. But hopefully I’ll avoid being in the data-loss dogbox again.
Stephen
10 November 2008, 09:46 #
Hourly backup! Far out, times have changed, disk is cheap, why not, I suppose incremental changes aren’t so bad.
I have rsnapshot running on my (Ubuntu) lappy once a day, backing up /home and /etc to a server. Haven’t needed it yet, but my backup theory is that’s why you run them: sod’s law prevention.
Alan
10 November 2008, 10:51 #
From what I can tell, it keeps, on a rolling basis: the last 24 hourly snapshots; a daily snapshot for each day of the last week; and after that, monthly snapshots. But that’s what the 1Tb of space is for.
Then it offers a very nifty (bordering on cheesy) UI for accessing the backups; and if you need to restore an entire disk you can do this using the MacOSX install disk – during the installation there’s an option to “Restore from Time Machine”.
(I have to be such a cheerleader to compensate for the horrific price of the thing.)
susan
11 November 2008, 09:11 #
Oooh! I want one too, alas, we have a PC.
Koz
11 November 2008, 10:52 #
The monthly snapshots start getting deleted when you run out of diskspace, but yeah they’re sweet.
My only complaint is that it can take AGES to run a snapshot, but I’ve yet to figure out what those occasions have in common.
Alan
11 November 2008, 11:12 #
Koz: using Bittorrent at the same time? :-)
Brian
15 November 2008, 11:34 #
I appreciate your semi-regular backup (or lack thereof) horror stories – because they remind me that my backup regime is nowhere as good as it should be, and it’s high time that I did something about it.
Brian
3 December 2008, 20:01 #
I’ve come up with a slightly different solution to this problem. Disk mirroring in a new (second hand) server. Doesn’t protect me against my own stupidity though…
Alan
3 December 2008, 20:08 #
Nice. Now all you need is off-site backup.