Backup plan
Friday, October 07, 2005
After the hard drive on my wife’s laptop went south earlier this week (prompting a dash to Office Depot to snag an external drive before the laptop breathed its last), I hastened my plans to get a good backup strategy in place.
I’d been backing up all my files and mail onto my 20G iPod every week, and archiving old project files on to CDs, so things weren’t too bad already. And using Basecamp as my project management extranet means that there’s already an external copy of project communication and files (which is another good reason for trying it out, but that’s another story).
But there’s always room for improvement.
The real need was to create a bootable clone of my entire drive. Then if my drive is fried, I can boot up from my clone and everything is as it was - all my apps, settings and files exactly as they were the last time I backed them up. In fact given that many external Firewire drives are faster than the internal drive on my Mac Mini, there’s even a good chance my machine would be faster than before.
The added bonus is that I needn’t even use my Mini to boot up the drive with - so if it’s the whole computer that’s mangled (or stolen), I can start up from my old laptop, or a loaner or whatever.
So that was the plan, and (fingers crossed) it seems to be working. I scored a LaCie 160G drive for a good price from B+H (at less than $1 a gig, storage sure is cheap these days) and then cast around for a good utility to help me out. SuperDuper! looked like it would do the job (and the $20 price was right), so as we speak, I’m cloning my drive and will do a practice boot up from the external to check it works.
I feel better already.