ear-fung.us I'm a programmer. I'm also pro-grammar.

My Computer Backup Strategy

...and disaster recovery plan.

As someone who relies on their computer for their livelihood, I have what I consider to be a pretty solid backup strategy.

I don't care who you are... if you're reading this and thinking, "I don't need to backup my computer", I'm here to tell you that you're sorely mistaken. If you have anything that you hold precious on your computer (whether that be photos, music, financial documents, recipes, etc) you need to backup your data somehow.

I have a 3-tiered backup and recovery plan:

1. I have a 250gig external drive that I use as a Time Machine backup drive.

   Right now, I can go back about 2 months and see almost every file that has been on my computer in Apple's mildly annoying Time Machine interface. This makes it easy for me to go grab a file that I may have deleted accidentally or roll back to a previous version of a document that I had edited.

2. I have a 1 terabyte external drive that gets a clone of my internal drive every night at 3am (Using Carbon Copy Cloner).

   This clone is bootable and also moves deleted files into an archive folder. This is a second layer of defense against accidentally deleting something in case of a catastrophic failure of my primary Time Machine drive. This drive also serves as a temporary working drive in case something should happen to my laptop's internal hard drive. I can work till I have time to grab another internal drive, install it, and copy all the content over.

3. I use Mozy to back up my really important stuff online. This backup runs every night.

   Granted, I don't copy everything to Mozy because of limited upload bandwidth at my house, but anything that I couldn't live without gets synced up to the Mozy cloud: my  iPhoto Library (16+gb), my iTunes Library (22+gb), financial documents (yes, Mozy storage is encrypted), archived project folders, and basically anything else that doesn't change a whole lot. Mozy is a great option to make an off site backup in case of a house fire, burglary,  or similar incident and I highly recommend it. (Click here save 10% on your first year of Mozy online backup service). One important distinction to make is that Mozy is a remote backup service, not an remote archival service. If you delete it from your machine, Mozy only stores that file for 30 days, after that, it's gone from their servers for all time.

So there's my backup solution trifecta. It's automated, it's easy to recover files, off site backups are encrypted, and most of all it's saved my butt numerous times.

How do you back up?