June is backup awareness month. It is important that you have some kind of backup plan in place. Whether you backup your files to CDs, DVDs, tapes, external hard drives, or online, you should always have a plan in order in case the unthinkable happens. Your hard drive will fail at some point, will you be ready when it does?
I will give you some insight into how I backup my important files.
First off, I backup all my important files and media to the “cloud” via CrashPlan. The data that I backup there includes mp3s, video files, documents, and pictures. It runs all day. Whenever it detects changes it encrypts the files and uploads the new file or new versions of the file.
All my entertainment media (video files and mp3s) are located on a 2tb external hard drive. This drive is mirrored to a second 2tb external hard drive. The mirroring process is handled by Carbon Copy Cloner and runs every Sunday. That way I have a local copy of all my media in case a drive goes down and I won’t have to download 400+gb from CrashPlan.
My iMac’s home directory is copied to the media drive every Sunday. This is done via CrashPlan’s backup to another hard drive feature. That way, when Carbon Copy Cloner runs, it also copies the home directory backup to the backup. Essentially, I have 3 local copies of my home directory: the original, the backup on the media drive, and the backup of the backup on the mirrored drive.
If that’s not enough for you, I have another backup drive that is used for Time Machine backups that only backs up my iMac’s hard drive (so it does not backup my media as that is all on an external drive larger than the Time Machine volume). I only back this up when my iMac warns me that it hasn’t been backed up using Time Machine in 10 days. I mainly use this in case something happens and I need to restore things such as preference panes and other machine configurations that aren’t backed up using my other methods.
Do you do backups? What does your backup plan look like?