Backup Support
Backups are essential. There are 3 basic categories we are trying to protect for when we copy the files on our computers to one or more alternate locations, as a “backup.” They are:
- Operator Error: as in, ‘Oops, did I really just put my novel in the trash and empty the trash?’
- Mechanical Failure: as in, ‘When I turned on my computer this morning, blue smoke came out and it made a horrible noise, and now it won’t start up.’
- Site Disaster such as theft, fire, flood, earthquake, tsunami, or nuclear meltdown.
We can achieve these protections in several ways: the simplest and most basic is simply to keep a copy of key files on a hard drive, flash drive, or other storage medium. In order to protect against the 3rd category, it would be necessary to take the copied files out of the home or office, preferably on a regular basis.
There are many backup programs and technical approaches to automate your backups. The best ones involve a minimum of user interaction, so that the backup largely takes care of itself; our experience is that if someone has to remember to do the backup manually, it will not be done regularly over a sustained period.
Apple’s Time Machine is a good backup option; as long as the hard drive or Time Capsule is connected it will backup everything hourly. However, by itself Time Machine does not inherently do anything about off-siting your backup; if a thief or a fire came thru, you could lose your backup along with your computer.
Creative Goose can develop and maintain a multiple-prong backup strategy for you. We favor using Time Machine or Retrospect for local backups, and one of several good Internet-based backup sites to achieve an off-site. Another way to achieve off-site backup is to regularly rotate your backup drives off-site — but again, this requires regular human interaction to consistently achieve the goal.
We have tested several Internet backup solutions, and partnered with two of them: BackBlaze is simplicity defined; like Time Machine, it backs up most everything, with a minimum of human interaction. iDrive allows for finer control of your backups, including deciding just what is to be backed up, and what time the backup may run. These services work well, and cost just $5 per month per computer. Backblaze is Mac-specific, whereas iDrive can backup Macs and PCs.
Bear in mind that it can literally take several weeks for an entire computer to be backed up to the Internet with these services, depending on how much data you have. Restores of individual files are much quicker, and in an emergency these companies can overnight you a hard drive with all of your data.
