Saturday, June 28, 2008

The Backup Saga Continues

After four days, Retrospect had not yet backed up even half of my information - seeming to be quite a bit slower than Time Machine. Several readers pointed out that Time Machine does in fact back up other hard drives, though it seems it doesn't back up anything but Mac OS (journaled). Perhaps this is why the original attempt at using Time Machine failed. I won't know for a while yet. I am currently doing a backup of the two internal drives and will add an external drive when that is done. Two of my external drives aren't journaled and the Time Machine documentation makes it pretty plain this is a problem.

I suspect I will have to copy the files on those disks to drobo separately, reformat the drives and restore the files to them.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

i've been following this saga from the beginning and i think i would share my experience. it is a lot simpler but the effectivity is very similar IMHO.
first of all, i have one folder per year - those contain subfolders with files i want to keep, finished work etc.
then there is a 'TEMP' folder with all the work in progress, unsorted files, etc. (purpose of this is to avoid archiving improperly named files, temporary versions, duplicates, tests etc - significantly reduces the amount of data needed to be backed up). as soon as a finished files are properly named and numbered (which is a raw, full-size tiff and low-res jpeg in a folder e.g. AP08-1234_filename), they are moved to the ARCHIVE_200x folder. that's the first, most important part - being organized :-). second part is simple once you get first right. basically, everything on internal HD is synced with another on-site HD (external HD or second machine's internal drive). since OSX is a *nix system, there should be a simple command to do this (on linux i use rsync or synctree). off-site backup is an external HD, usually done weekly. next part is archiving it all to a reliable media, which is AIT we have at work in my case. can be performed monthly, 4x or even 2x a year. note that there are no files added to previous year's folder (ARCHIVE_2007) so once you have it on tapes (preferably in fire-proof safe), you don't need to sync this folder which makes backup a lot faster, you can also delete is from off-site extHD.
anyway, this works for me. seems complicated but it isn't, actually, it is very easy and a lot cheaper than RAID if one is organized (which involves deleting stuff that's not really needed in the first place). might work for somebody else as well...
all the best