Advice wanted - external drives and backup strategy

[major_clanger]

The backup solution for my Mac (2005-era dual-core G5 Powermac, running OSX 10.4.11) is currently as follows:

- important current work done via Dropbox
- Daily backup of key settings to my iDisk via OS X Backup
- Various daily/weekly/monthly backup jobs of documents, pictures and music from the main 250Gb drive to a second internal 250Gb drive I installed a couple of years ago.

Clearly this doesn't give me off-site backup and frankly I've accumulated enough stuff that the second drive isn't really big enough any more.

Now, given that I rarely go more than a month without visiting my mum down in Woking it occurs to me that I could get two 1TB external drives and make a habit of the following:

- Do a full backup onto Drive 1
- Do daily incremental backups onto Drive 1
- When I visit my mum, take Drive 1 down, leave it with her, and pick up Drive 2, left on my last visit
- Do a full backup onto Drive 2
- Do daily incremental backups onto Drive 2
- When I visit my mum, take Drive 2 down, leave it with her, and pick up Drive 1
- and repeat ad infinitum

This way I have a local backup that is at most a day old (and as I said, most stuff I am actively working on I host via Dropbox so is continuously backed up off site) and have a full backup no more than a month old some 40 miles away.

Any major flaws with this plan? And any particular reccomendations for 1TB or similar external drives that will work well with my setup?

Comments

[ramtops.livejournal.com]

The flaw with this is that you will forget to take the drives, or worse, forget to pick them up; also, if you need your backup it is 40 miles away.

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

Well, there's the alternative of store the drive in my office and swap it once a week or so. And then it's only a tube-ride away.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

At weekends / night?

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

I have an access pass that lets me in the back door at all hours, and if need be the N15 bus runs all night and gets me to within a 5-minute walk of Lincolns Inn Fields.

[swisstone.livejournal.com]

I've got no plans to do stuff offsite, but I have just ordered a couple of 1 TB drives for the same reasons, that my 250 Gb drives are no longer sufficient.

I bought Western Digital, primarily because they're cheaper, but also because of the two drives I've got at the moment, the WD has performed faultlessly, whilst the Seagate drive has some bad sectors and has lost some data.

[unwholesome-fen.livejournal.com]

I second WD, and disrecommend Lacie (defective power supply, and googling suggested this is a common problem with them).

[teaparty.net (from livejournal.com)]

there are two separate issues here, backup strategy and offsite strategy.

Backup strategy

i am a horrid old sysadmin from the dawn of time (see, eg, http://tomayko.com/writings/that-dilbert-cartoon ) so i'm afraid i prefer tape to disc backups. but i do understand that tape drives have fallen out of favour, not least because drive capacities have not kept pace with disc capacities, so i accept that backup to HDD is preferred by most people.

whatever the medium, it is vital that your backup strategy is (a) automated and (b) capable of complaining REALLY LOUDLY if it starts to go wrong. otherwise it will let you down at some vital point, either because you forgot to kick the backups off, or because the system kicked them off but the drive was full / tape drive needed cleaning / bus was down / dog ate your scheduler. if you get that right you qualify to start worrying about your offsite strategy.

Offsite strategy

personally, i have a media-grade firesafe at home under the stairs, into and out of which tapes are rotated, and every monday cron tells me what tapes to remove and what tapes to put into the little stacker i picked up from a local company who were upgrading their backup kit (but i accept that this is also a little odd). i could do the same thing with HDDs, and i could just as easily take some to my place of work / family member's house. the important considerations are (a) will you get there both regularly and frequently, (b) will the backups be safe there, and (c) what risks are you trying to protect against?

Sort out c first. I want both moron-recovery (I did something stupid) and disaster-recovery (something bad happened) capability. The former must be quick, but if the house burns down it's enough to know that I can restore eventually; other things will need sorting out first. That decision informs the use of a domestic firesafe. If you can wait 48 hours to perform any kind of restore, then it's OK to store them somewhere 24 hours away. The usual tradeoff is that places that will look after your backups well are harder to get to; pick the best possible quality of storage commensurate with the timescales decided above.

That was a longer answer than I had intended. Does it help any?

[daveon.livejournal.com]

I know a lot of people moving to Carbonite for offsite online backup.

I have a HP Home Server with 4TB of drives in it for pretty much everything and as a side effect it backs up all the household PCs daily. Although, we're a fairly solidly MS shop.

I'm thinking of moving to Carbonite for the Home Server so I've a full backup of the core important stuff offline - photo's, music, email, files etc...

I'm not planning to have offsite backup of other media as I've physical copies and I'm not that fussed about most of it.

[biggingerdave.livejournal.com]

The only thing I would add, is to make sure that your backup is encrypted. If it's stolen, then potentially it could be embarrassing, perhaps disastrous.

I've been using crashplan to backup to a friends' hard drive offsite, and it's both regular (so I can forget about it) and painless. Also, it's encrypted, so he can't hack into my files.