My Mac Backup Strategy

As I've been going through the process of upgrading to Mavericks (the subject of an upcoming post), a lot of my time has been spent backing up my systems. I thought it might be good to go through my backup strategy. This post will cover backing up my Apple laptops; I can see a future post on backing up iOS devices.

At this point, there really aren't many (any?) reasons why you aren't backing up your computers, tablets and phones. Apple provides Time Machine and backing up to iCloud for iOS devices. I'm not that familiar with Microsoft but I know they provide tools for doing automated backups. If you're an Android and Google user, the majority of your data should already be on Google servers, and Google provides ways of backing up photos and videos (you should be using Google+). There are other online services like Dropbox, Box and Google Drive, that are simple to setup and can be used to backup critical files. Yes, to use Time Machine or other local backup solutions you may have to buy an external drive or Time Capsule, but drives have come down in price so much that's not much of a detriment. So do yourself a big favor, get a drive, connect it to your computer and get backups turned on!

I have a couple of purposes for backups. The first is for accidental file removal or corruption. For this I rely on Apple's Time Machine. I used to use a Time Capsule connected via Wi-Fi, but found the backup speed to be very slow, especially the initial backup which could take days to complete. So now I have a 2TB external disk that I backup to. This is not a perfect solution as I must remember to connect and backup on a regular basis. I end up doing it at least once a month.

The second purpose for backups is disaster recovery. This would be if my Time Machine backups were corrupted, if something happened to the house (such as a fire), or something like spilling coffee all over your computer (does that sound like I'm speaking from experience?). There are some good online backup services like CrashPlan and Carbonite. But for me personally, I have a lot of sensitive data on my machine like tax returns and years of financial information that I would rather keep off the Internet as much as possible. So I use SuperDuper! for disaster recovery. SuperDuper! creates a bootable clone of your system. They have a free version, plus a paid version that gives some great features like the ability to schedule backups and scripting support. Once I backup my computers with SuperDuper!, I keep the drive at work. I only backup with SuperDuper a few times a year, plus when I'm getting ready to do major upgrades.

Speaking of upgrades, the final purpose for me is peace of mind while doing upgrades. Apple upgrades almost always go smoothly and I've never had to downgrade after upgrading, but at least with backups I have the ability to. Plus, if something gets removed during the upgrade process I can restore it from my backups.

When preparing for a major upgrade like Mavericks, I make sure my Time Machine backups are up-to-date and run a SuperDuper! backup immediately prior to performing the upgrade. Once the upgrade is complete and I am fairly confident in its stability, I will delete my Time Machine backup and do a fresh backup. I will leave my SuperDuper! backup with the previous version for a few weeks just to make sure I don't discover something later. A month or two after the upgrade I'll do another SuperDuper! backup, and so at that point everything is again back in sync.