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Back Up Your Data & Save A Squirrel

Friday, January 13th, 2012 | Author: OWC Chris S.

A couple of months ago, OWC Stephen wrote an article that dealt with RAID units not being a “true” backup for your data. This caused confusion for some people; after all, RAID has built-in redundancy (it’s the first letter, for goodness’ sake!), so data should be completely safe, right?

Well… not really.

RAID will protect you against drive failure; that’s exactly what it’s designed to do. However, there are a lot of other things that can cause data loss. For example, if you knock the average RAID enclosure off your desk, there’s a good chance both drives are going to be damaged. If both drives are damaged, then anything on that unit is gone.

What it comes down to is that an actual “backup” consists of at least two copies of the files you want to keep.

  1. the original file (usually on your main hard drive)
  2. a copy of the file (preferably on some sort of external device that can be moved off-site)

Ideally, you’d want three copies – your original and two copies – one on-site and one off-site in case of things like fires, tornadoes or theft. That, however, is an article unto itself, full of “exciting” topics like “backup drive rotation scheduling” and “methodology comparison.” Yeah… about as exciting as that Economics class we all had to take in high school, in that stuffy classroom which, despite being windowless, somehow still admitted the slightly disturbing smells emanating from the cafeteria kitchens just down the hall.

Instead, we’re going to talk about something much more exciting: a cross-country auto race. No, I haven’t watched Cannonball Run one too many times; I’ve got a viable (if somewhat bizarre) analogy going here; just follow along. Article Continues…

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AirPort Apparently Not The Best Place For Time Machine

Tuesday, November 15th, 2011 | Author: OWC Chris S.

We’ve gotten a couple of emails from readers wondering how to get Time Machine to work with an AirPort.

Well… theoretically, getting the DeLorean up to 88 miles per hour on a long stretch of tarmac would probably be fairly straightforward. Take a base 0-60 time of 8.8 seconds, factor acceleration curve for 60-88mph, account for deceleration while swerving around the occasional 747, and you’ll need about …

… What? You meant using Time Machine via an AirPort Base Station?

Oh.

That’s something completely different – and a lot easier to talk about.

The Theory

In early 2008, Apple introduced Time Capsule, which essentially combined an AirPort Base Station and a 500GB-1TB hard drive. At first glance, replicating this setup with a AirPort Extreme Base Station would seem to be fairly simple.

First, you attach a drive (such as a NewerTech miniStack, which stacks nicely underneath) to the USB port on your Base Station. Then, mount it on your desktop like you would any other remote drive. Finally, select it as your TimeMachine backup disk and let it run. After the initial (lengthy) backup, Time Machine will mount the drive remotely when connected to the network, run its backup, then disconnect – just like with Time Capsule.

The Reality

Article Continues…

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Make sure your backup strategy is protecting you.

Thursday, December 17th, 2009 | Author: OWC Chris S.

OWC-Helmet

We talk a lot about backing up around here; I’d say it has been the third-most popular topic here on the OWC Blog, behind memory upgrades and price specials. In fact, OWC Mike H. posted a piece about backing up early last week.

However, this time around, I’d like to take a slightly different track that we don’t always cover – even with automated services like Time Machine, backing up still needs to be an active process.

In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll relate that this particular topic stems from recent personal experience. Earlier this month, my father (who I help with the upkeep on his Mac mini at his company) had his main hard drive fail on him.

“No problem,” I thought, “I set up an automated nightly backup on the system. All I need to do is replace the internal drive, then restore from the backup and we’ll be good to go.”

Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite that simple. Sure, we made annual backups to CDs, mostly for record-keeping purposes, but trusted that backup software to do the rest in between. The problem is that for some reason, the backup routine had stopped sometime over April of last year. As it had run reliably for quite some time prior to that point, we’d never checked it for consistency – that was our major mistake.

As a result, none of the data created since the beginning of the year was backed up when the hard drive went bad. Considering the amount of money involved with the data (I won’t go into details, but it is rather significant), the concept of losing it all is pretty much catastrophic.

There are a pair of lessons we can learn from this story:

1.) Automatic backups need to be periodically checked.

Check your backups from time to time just to make sure all the data is in good shape. In my case, it would have also helped to determine whether or not the darn thing was backing up in the first place. Believe me, the worst time to find out your backup is out of date or no good is on the day you need it.

2.) Make multiple copies of data you can’t afford to lose.

I also recommend keeping one or more these copies off-site, so if one backup fails (or is damaged, etc.) you at least have copies of the really important data somewhere.

Fortunately, OWC has all the equipment you need to set up or improve your backup strategy. From our award-winning external Storage Solutions, to recordable media, to replacement internal drives for ones that have failed, we have you covered.

Oh, as for our little story above, we were fortunate enough to be able to recover the “lost” data by using Prosoft Engineering’s Data Rescue 3. We hooked the failed drive up to another computer via an OWC Express enclosure, and let Data Rescue go at it. It took about a week to process, but from all the checks we’ve done, it appears that all the data that had once been “lost” has now been recovered.

I love a happy ending.

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Category: Random Thoughts & Topics, Tech Tips
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Synchronicity

Thursday, July 16th, 2009 | Author: OWC Chris S.

Every once in a while, my day-to-day computing adventures manage to coincide with something that’s reverberating through the Macintosh Community at large. This last week was just such an example.

Over the last week or so, there have been a number of discussions in a number of forums regarding backups in general, with a focus on Time Machine in particular. Oddly enough, about this time last week, the boot drive on my work machine crashed.

As you may have guessed, I am a huge proponent of regular backups. I’ve written  articles about it. I’ve given presentations at Macworld about it. Now, I’m blogging about it. You could say I have a bit of a fixation on backing up. Fortunately, this fixation meant that I was able to keep working while a new drive was procured and was running at full speed again within a couple hours.

After dealing with that then seeing the unusual jump in articles discussing backup, I figured it may be prudent to explore some common backup methods.

Time Machine

A lot has been written about Time Machine. I, myself, have written a couple articles on the topic: one when it first came out and a wider-ranging one a couple of months ago.

Personally, I use Time Machine fairly frequently, as I have the unfortunate habit of emptying my Trash almost reflexively. It’s hard to say how many times Time Machine has enabled me to retrieve a file I just trashed. That protection is well worth the cost of a decent external drive.

Cloning

Time Machine is incredibly useful and effective, except in one instance: when you need to be back up and running quickly. That’s where a “clone” of your drive comes in handy.

Effectively a “clone” is a file-for-file copy of your boot drive. That means that if your main drive goes down, you can boot from your cloned copy and pick up at the last backup point. Unfortunately, everything you did after that point is lost.

Cloning software is easy-to-find. A copy of the popular Carbon Copy Cloner is included with every OWC and Newer Technology Storage Solution. You can even automate the backups to be as frequent as you want.

Hardware redundancy

Of course, if you want to always have a completely up-to-date “backup” that works automatically, then you may want to look into a RAID of some sort. The easiest to use would be the NewerTech Guardian MAXimus, which is an all-in-one Mirrored RAID (RAID 1). If one drive fails, there is an automatic copy which you can run off of until you can replace the failed drive.

A little more advanced is the OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro Qx2, which can provide more advanced RAID setups and larger capacities.

Its instantaneous nature is both a strength and a weakeness. Because it copies file information without an intermediary, if a file is corrupted on one disk, it is corrupted on the backup as well.

Additionally, you are limited to the speed of the bus you are connected to. If you have eSATA capability on your computer, this won’t be a problem – the total bandwidth available is higher than the physical drives can output. Otherwise, you’ll need to use FireWire 800,400, or USB 2.0. Those busses, however, will be saturated by the drives, potentially slowing the system down.

Combinations

This is exactly what it sounds like: a combination of two or more methods. This helps offset the weaknesses of one method with the strengths of another. In my instance, I have one drive dedicated to Time Machine, and another that is a fully-bootable clone, which I update daily. When my drive went down, I was able to boot to my clone, and retrieve any new, non-cloned files I needed via Time Machine.

Another option would be to run your system off of a RAID 0 (or RAID 5) and use another (single or RAID) drive to hold Time Machine backups. The variations are only as limited as your imagination and budget.

Don’t Delay

Backing up is something you don’t think about until your hard drive fails. Unfortunately, it isn’t a matter of “if” but of “when.”

Do you have a plan in place for when the inevitable happens?

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