What's your back-up strategy?

Up to now, I have been burning projects at the end of the month on DVDs. But about 6 months ago, I requested an external 250GB HDD- Firewire 800 to clone the current HDD on every Friday and then unplug the external. I am hoping to get the HDD in about 1-2 months... damn corporations... :(

I think external is the best. Do the back-up and then unplug.

Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) works very well. I used it alot at work to backup to an external FW HD. I set up a few scripts using that software to backup my three drives onto the partitioned external drives. It supports data syncing, too. Also it happens to be FREE.

First of all, I have an internal 200 gb for daily backup for clients work. At the end of the day everything just get's dumped in there as a copy. Because, losing a file can end up costing you a lot more than a days work...it may cost you the client.

Also, I have (2) 250 gb external FireWire HD's. One backup kept on location and (1) off site. I also make a quartly DVD backup. It's works for me, I have about 500mb in working files and about 5Tb in backed up jobs.

By the way, don't back up your programs and system. I find when a HD fails (Which has happened to me) having to re-instal software..etc is the least of your worries (I assume you own all your apps! so you have the disks)

Up till now, I've never ever backed up anything buy I'm thinking of doing so now.

My school project folder is getting larger and taking quite a lot of space too. I'm thinking of getting myself not only and external HD, but looking into a DVD-RW too so I can have my stuff on HD and also on a portable backup format incase the HD gets stolen. Sorry to hear your iPod got stolen Ivan.

Doesn't the Mac have USB because I noticed you mentioned FireWire? (naive emoticon goes here)

Yeah, I was going to ask does Mac have FireWire because of its standards but I thought better not, someone might say USB is way cooler.

I have this, what is it? "IEEE1394 Port - FireWire" lolz. Sorry to sound so dumb.

i'd probably get a cheap 200gb internal hdd and a cheap external case, preferably Firewire + USB ones. For me a simple crontab line to use rsync for backing up was it. No fancy softwares...

I use a noisy Lacie 160gb to backup every few days. Using Apple's Backup app is easy enough but it seems to save a contained file that needs BackUp to restore it in case of data loss.
It's Firewire 400 but is quick enough since it only updates if there are any file changes.It makes sense to leave it connected if you are using a desktop but if you are on the road, it's a bit of an effort to stop and set up for regular backups.
afterglow.ie

I really like DéJà Vu, in combination with a Mercury Elite 160GB Firewire 800 (it also has USB2). I set it to back up once a week as a mirror to my main drive. I use to use Psync as well, but it doesn't look like its ever updated anymore. I think both apps use the built-in unix rsync functions (I may be wrong about this).

I had a really bad experience with Apple's Backup. At the time it would not copy over any .folders or save applications. Not sure if this has been fixed but I thought it was a really oversight at the time. I had it set to backup my Games folder and all that was left was the data, not the actual .apps. When I asked on Apple support they simply told me that it was not meant to be used as an application backup software.

Using Apple's Backup app is easy enough but it seems to save a contained file that needs BackUp to restore it in case of data loss.

Actually, if you CTRL-click on a Backup archive and choose "show package contents" you should be able to view all the original files inside.

I have been backing up using Retrospect to a Firelite 60 gig external portable firewire HD. It fits in my winter jacket pocket and then hangs on my belt in summer. I don't go anywhere without it. Ever. Retrospect has a Duplicate command and that means just copying the changed files. It is fast and it scans for copy errors. Not the cheapest solution, but you do feel a sense of power knowing it is backed up, it is up-to-date, and it is with you.
And why bother backing up a system. Just backup your user folder. In a catastrophic crash you just re-install, or buy a new Mac. And if you get a model that replaces one older than 9 months, you'll need a new hardware-specfic system anyway.

Eric
www.photoshopsupport.com

I have found using SilverKeeper to backup my user (excluding my iTunes folder) to my iPod to work best. Everytime you sync it just copies new/changed data and normally takes about 2 minutes. You could use an external firewire drive if you wanted - but if you have an iPod why not. Oh, and you're questioning whether to get a new iPod or not? Dude, I would sell my soul to get get new one if I lost it. ;)

I recently splurged and bought a Lacie Big Disk Extreme - a 500gb FW400 & FW800 beast of a machine. It's actually nearly silent because of it's fanless design, which is handy.

But it comes loaded with Silverkeeper on the drive - as well as a CD version. Pretty nifty. Silverkeeper canb e done manually or on a program, you just name the folder/drive to backup, and the location to back up to, and away it goes. It will check for previously backed up files, and synchronize your backup.

Of course I also habitually back up to DVD, because my last notebook had 3 drives physically crash. So I don't trust laptop drives whatsoever.

i use gmail as a file system to store crucial things - in progress works; regulary used code snippets; my thesis; portfolio in jpeg and pdf; cv; motivational letters. it works pretty well, but a bit slow. i used to upload crucial things to my home page via ftp, but was really sluggish, and as a free host, i wasn't allowed to use .htacces and .htpasswd files to keep them out of sight.

http://notv.fw.hu - relaunching soon

http://www.zdnet.com.au/reviews/hardware/storage/0,39023427,20269043,00.htm

I also do it the "HD1, HD2 -> Ext. HD"-way. Of course it's the most comfortable strategy (speed, re-writeable, capacity), but if you consider lifespan and costs per mb one should backup on dvd.........maybe just the most important projects.

It works very well, though there's been no need for it yet. I used CCC, then just copied my home directory over (and nothing else) when there was no space for apps 'n' other crap that can be easily replaced.

Oh and it's 120 GB. DON'T buy a 12O GB one! It's too small!
I'll look into getting a 25O GB FireWire drive soon.

I use a back-up app called SuperDuper. It's not free, but is excellent. I back up the whole system to an external drive weekly, and back my home folder to another partion on the same external every few days. The full back-up is a bootable clone.

Personally I mirror my drive every night internally to another hard drive, and I have an external that I take backups weekly on. I use Retrospect and it works out well. Bottom line when it comes to backups, don't be caught with your pants down :)

1/ Cloned boot volume to #1 FW drive - monthly.
2/ Daily back up of "working" folder to #2 FW drive - Apple's Backup 2 software.
3/ Regularly write DVD or CD when "working" folder size dictates.
4/ "working" folder stored on separate internal drive.

I sleep well at night! ;-)

I backup my internal 36GB SCSI to an external 40GB FW automatically using Retrospect EVERY DAY -- overwriting on Fridays. Set it up and let it go. I guess I need to get some of this stuff off site though.

When a job is done it does on CD for good.

I've been archiving to DVD as needed and keeping copies in the firesafe. Lately I've been researching hot-swap solutions and it looks like I'm going to upgrade the drives in my G5 and use the "old" drives as backups. I've not entirely decided on the hardware, but its come down to something from FirmTek or WiebeTech. I like the hot-swap housings because I can just pop the drive out and put it in the firesafe, then pop yesterday's drive into the bay - its much like the old tape backup solutions. An added advantage is being able to take a clone of my desktop machine with me, all it takes is a firewire-sata drive dock and I've got everything I need without being reliant on the small powerbook drive.

The first Maxtor 300gb showed up yesterday. When I get a sec, I'll clone my current drive, upgrade it to Tiger and I can take the older drives out when I'm sure Tiger is stable enough and all of my apps function correctly.

I use the excellent ChronoSync on a regular basis to keep my iBook synced with my eMac. Not quite everything (my eMac has a 160GB drive while the iBook only has 60GB) but everything really vital.

I also have two external FireWire drives. On one I back up my eMac's entire drive. On the other, I back up my iBook's entire drive. I do that about once a month or so, depending on some different factors.

I never ever do major backups. The only time I ever had a catastrophic data loss was on two occasions, when my system crashed during a full system backup and irretrievably corrupted the entire disk system. So now I just avoid backups entirely, it's too risky.
I do make archives of crucial work data on an continual basis. But there is no point to doing OS and app backups. It is faster and easier to reinstall the OS and apps than to try to restore a complex configuration from a backup. Even if your machine and all your backups were stolen, an OS and apps are easily replaceable, you can always go to a store and buy new hardware and new apps. But the data you created yourself, by hand, by scanning, by drawing, by writing, THAT is irreplaceable, and must be archived. Note I say ARCHIVED, not backed up, archives are different. Archives involve saving multiple copies of work files throughout the development of a job. I view my archives as a static type of Version Control systems, I keep copies of EVERY intermediate version of a project.

The thing thats not addressed in any of this is what do you do with those backups you take offsite? OP has already to losing all his current clients data on the IPOD that got stolen. Do the clients know that?
You have a responsibilty to your clients to look after their data. that includes not uploading docs to the site, not storing it on cd's and losing them, and I would say not storing it on an IPOD which you could get mugged for on the bus home.

I had dropped my laptop once and was in the middle of a very large project for a client. I was saving a several GB photoshop doc and the drop cracked the read/write head in the hard drive unbeknownst to me. I immediatly tried backing up the data by putting my PowerBook in transfer mode and copying the files to a friend's G5, but of course this didn't work because the read/write head was cracked off and sitting on top of the disk. Well once the disk got spinning, it was clear by the noises that something was terribly wrong. I sent the drive into DriveSavers for data recovery and was out 2 grand. That was an expensive lesson to learn. Now I backup my data automatically every night using Carbon Copy Cloner and an 80Gb Iomega external USB2 drive. But I don't really trust Iomega and my laptop's getting pretty full now that I'm doing video editing. So soon I'll be getting a large (250Gb?) file server with a raid backup. I'll back up to it everynight over the network and just keep working projects on my laptop. Better safe than sorry.

I have one folder that I put all data that is critical to me in. This folder includes backups of various things around my computer (such as my iCal calendars) and also archived work that I'd like to keep. What I then do is synchronize this using rsync to a PGP Disk on my iPod. The great thing about rsync is that it's an incremental backup solution, so that I don't have to transfer the whole gigabyte every time I want to back something up after I chanaged one file.