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I live on my laptop and the data on it and my desktop is of critical importance (from family pictures to marketing videos to iPhone apps under construction). I’ve seen too many people in the last couple years lose something critical because it only existed in one place. Of course our key business data lives on file servers, source code revision control systems and databases that have their own backup strategies but for anything that lives on a laptop, additional measures are required.

Having been personally burned during system and hardware failures before with partially functioning backup systems or restore efforts taking large amounts of effort, I put in place a bit of an extreme backup strategy for my systems. My data now resides in 5 different systems at all times ensuring that no single or even dual failures can wipe anything out. It is also spread out geographically to 3 different locations so a catastrophic event like a fire won’t be crippling either.

Environment:

• MacBook Pro 17″ with 1TB of storage (future blog article coming about that)
• MacPro desktop with 2x750gb drives (one for system & apps, second for all data)

Backup Tools:

• Time Machine & Time Capsule
• SuperDuper! & 1TB external USB HD
• ChronoSync
• Backblaze

Time Machine & Time Capsule
Any time I plug the laptop in at home, Time Machine will start working its magic and pulling the data to the 1TB Time Capsule sitting in the basement. Since it typically runs over WiFi this one is the second slowest in terms of backups, but leaving the laptop sitting there overnight works just fine.  The Time Capsule can be a finicky piece of hardware and I have had it lose its mind to the point of needing to be wiped and the data fully backed up again.  Since I always have other backups in place this hasn’t been too troublesome but it definitely points to not using any single solution as the only backup.

SuperDuper!
When sitting down in my office and plugging the myriad of cables into my laptop, one of them is for a 1TB external USB hard drive.  When SuperDuper detects this drive plugged in it does a direct backup to the drive.  This is a very welcome update to the SuperDuper software and is a very fire and forget solution.  Other than remembering to eject the USB drive before unplugging and leaving the office, it’s on full auto pilot.

ChronoSync
Because I work on both the desktop and laptop, ChronoSync comes in very handy to keep my 500+ GB of data directories in sync across the machines. Upon firing up ChronoSync on the laptop it connects to my desktop over the network and performs the sync. I run this one as a manual operation when I know worthwhile changes have been made on either system as I don’t trust anything to make automatic conflict resolutions with key data.  In the rare case a conflict between the two systems has been flagged (somehow a file was updated on both) I’ll manually address it.

Backblaze
Backblaze is an online backup service that will archive as much data as you need for $5 per computer. It can require very heavy internet usage to keep that backup updated (the initial backup can take days or in my case weeks) so you also have to be aware of any bandwidth limits your ISP may impose.  It is also a great fire and forget solution, continually running in the background and backing up files.  It’s also a great way to be able to snag a key file from the backup using their web interface and downloading a zip file.  They’ll also send a backup on DVDs or an external HD for an additional fee.  For $5/month there’s no excuse to not have this one in your backup bag of tricks.