I live in a digital world. All of our family photographs from the last dozen years or more are stored on a hard drive connected to our home computer. And all of our music.
As is all of my work, not just for clients, but also my plays and creative work.
I backup continually and automatically using Apple’s Time Machine. I backup online using Crashplan. I duplicate my drives using Superduper.
And yet, this backup is incomplete. I believe it’s impossible to be too paranoid about backups.
To be really covered in the case of a disaster, I need an offsite backup. And I’m doing that.
Are you?
Too many people have no backups at all. Storing your photos and documents on an external hard drive is NOT a backup. Dropbox is NOT a backup. A backup is separate from the original files. A backup is a duplicate. And the best duplicate is somewhere other than where your files reside.
Take, for example, a worst case scenario. Someone breaks into your home while you are absent and steals your computers and drives. They are very thorough. Or your home is swallowed up by a sinkhole. EVERYTHING is gone. Let’s not forget to mention tornados, hurricanes, fires, floods, and the most likely of disasters: you. Most data loss comes from people screwing up in some spectacular and unexpected way.
If you’ve made an online backup, you’re covered, but it might take weeks to restore your file (or you might have to pay to have a drive with your backups shipped to you). But if you’ve made a backup copy and stored it somewhere else, you’re covered, at least from the time of your last remotely stored backup.
Hard drives fail. I don’t make the rules. All drives must fail. An incomplete backup will almost certainly cause you headaches and heartache.
Get a little more paranoid about your backups. I highly recommend Joe Kissel’s book Take Control of Backing Up Your Mac. Get it. Read it. Follow Joe’s advice.
And, perhaps, get just a bit more paranoid about backing up your electronic life.
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Randy MurrayIncomplete Backup by Randy Murray, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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