Introduction
Three Sundays ago, my primary Mac OS X hard drive failed. Those of you who follow me on Twitter got somewhat of a play-by-play as I discovered the depth of my drive failure I got home to the Spinning Pinwheel of Death (SPOD), and discovered quickly that my computer would not wake from screensaver or boot. However, I didn’t panic. Why? Because I have what I believe to be a relatively robust backup system for home use.
I can’t stress enough how important regular backups are. Data loss is one of my personal nightmares (well, that, and Lego or Andrle loss), since most of my life (professional and personal) is on the computer. Among other things, I’d lose every picture I’ve ever taken since freshman year of college, every homework assignment I’ve written on the computer since late 6th grade (when we got our first Mac), not to mention substantial configuration work and those precious saved games.
I sit atop what I call the Backup Tripod: regular clones to an external disk stored off-site, hourly incremental backups to a local disk or local network storage, and as-needed on-save synchronization to cloud storage. I’m sure there are many other articles out there that recommend a particular strategy, but this is my solution for Macs. I even convinced my parental units to use a similar setup. I’ll go into detail on what solutions I use and why (as well as recovery strategy) for each below the cut.
I can’t emphasize enough how important data backup is for the typical modern power user.
