Better have a backup plan!

I have recently been doing a lot of work on my backup plan.  No, I don't mean my plan to work as a barista after giving up on the legal profession.  I am instead referring to backing up my hard drive.

I only started getting serious about backing up about six months ago, during the same time that I read David Sparks's Magnum Opus on going paperless.  Because I wanted to adopt the paperless workflow, I had to get serious about backup.  As a result, I purchased two Seagate Backup Plus for Mac 1 TB hard external hard drives (my main computer is a mid-2010 Macbook Pro).  I specifically purchased two so that I could keep one at home and one at the office.  My apartment is only a few miles from my office, which, of course, means that if there was a major disaster in this immediate area, it could result in both backups being lost forever.  But, if that were to happen, I think I would probably have much bigger concerns than whether my backups are okay.  The main concern I have is my apartment or office getting broken into, in which case, the burglar may very well take my hard drive in addition to my laptop (though I doubt he'd know what to do with it).

Since purchasing my two hard drives, I have solely used them for Time Machine backups.  Although I had read about Super Duper, I was a little intimidated by the program and didn't know how to fit it in with Time Machine.  But recently, I took another look at Super Duper, which is a $30 program.  The main difference between Time Machine and Super Duper is that Super Duper can actually be used as a start up drive.  This makes all the difference in a situation where time is of the essence.

So let's say your hard drive crashed and all you had done was create TM backups.  What would you have to do to get back up and running?  Well, my understanding (I'm not an expert) is that you'd probably have to get a new computer, reinstall OSX and then restore to your last TM backup.  That doesn't seem too bad, since you'll probably be buying a new computer if your hard drive is fried anyways.  But what if you have an important meeting today and all the files for the meeting were on the hard drive that crashed?  Well, then you're pretty much SOL.

But if you had backed up with Super Duper, then you can actually plug in the external hard drive with the super duper back up to another Mac and get your files directly from the drive.  In fact, if your computer is still working after the hard drive crashed, then you can press down on the option key on startup and actually select the super duper drive as your start up disk, which would enable you to get on with your day using your laptop with the fried disk as if nothing had happened.  This could also come in handy in the situation in which you have to send your mac off to Apple for several weeks.  If all you had were your time machine backups, then you'd just have to live without your files for several weeks while your computer is getting repaired.

Super Duper is definitely well worth the $30 price tag for adherent's to Murphy's law.  When disaster strikes, it will likely happen at the worst possible time.  At least with Super Duper, you know you can get to your files when you need them.

One perplexing aspect to doing both Super Duper and Time Machine backups is how to most effectively use my limited hard drive space for both.  This required me to finally learn how to partition my external hard drives.  With disk utility on Mac, you can pretty easily partition your hard drive.  The most important things to know is that the format to use is OS extended (journaled) and to select GUID partition under options, which is required for using the Super Duper partition as a startup disk.  Basically, I have partitioned both of my external hard drives and am using half of each hard drive as a Time Machine backup and the other half as a Super Duper backup.  The hard drive on my Macbook Pro is only 250 GB, so I think that 500 GB is sufficient for the Time Machine backups.

I believe that 500 GB for Time Machine backups would probably permit me to have TM backups for at least a year or more, which is really more than enough for my purposes.  I can't imagine why I would want to restore my system to farther back than last week, let alone last year.  Of course, the most obvious reason to most end users like myself that you'd want to be able to restore to a previous restore point is that if you've downloaded a virus or some other program that is wreaking havoc on your computer.  This would seem to me to be obvious in most instances immediately upon downloading the program and you would not need to go very far back to get rid of it.  The only bad thing about partitioning in my case is that I now have to do the initial Time Machine backup all over due to all previous backups being erased.  This, of course, is very time consuming and takes several hours.  But the upside is that it gave me an opportunity to note how easy it is to encrypt your backups on TM.  All you have to do is check the box when selecting a new disk.

By doing both TM and Super Duper backups on two different disks, I feel that my information is safe and secure.  The major benefit in my mind to backing up this way is that you know that content is stored locally instead of being the property of the cloud.  Don't get me wrong, I am a regular user of Dropbox and Drive, but another thing I have done recently is move as much content out of those folders and back on my hard drive.  The main reason for the doing this was because I was getting very confused by the many duplicate files I had across the various platforms.  By putting it all back on my hard drive, I've hopefully made things more organized.  But I also have security concerns about some of the files that I kept in the cloud.  I trust that most of my content is safe in the cloud.  but for some files, I'd just rather not take the risk (e.g., tax and other financial documents).  I also have an independent obligation as an attorney to make sure that my client's files are secure.  By storing their confidential information locally, I feel that I am doing all that I can reasonably do to protect their information.

Happy Holidays.