Back Up for Dummies

[Steve W. Jackson]

Originally Posted by Bob White

Then Jo needs to spend $29 (US) for Snow Leopard and start using Time Machine. It has saved my bacon several times. I love it! Its only shortcoming is its lack of the user being able to customize its schedule. That is overcome by using a freeware application named (what else?) TimeMachineEditor. You can find it at http://timesoftware.free.fr/timemachineeditor/. (In saying this, I am presuming her Mac to be new enough to upgrade to SL and recommending SL because it costs $100 less than Leopard.)

And I'm going to disagree with the advice to use TimeMachineEditor or any other tool to tinker with the backup scheduling.

Why? Because unless you use certain software that creates *very* large files on a frequent basis that you don't want backed up, and unless those files are not in a place you can tell Time Machine to ignore, it already does an outstanding job of managing the backups without any tweaking. It backs up hourly. After the hourly backups are 24 hours old, it consolidates them into a single backup for that day without losing anything. And once those daily backups are a month old, it does the same with them, consolidating into a single monthly backup which contains every item backed up in the month.

Otherwise, even if you really do have a legitimate need to tinker with the frequency of backups, it's difficult to find a simpler backup mechanism than this one. Get yourself a Time Capsule or attach a large external drive and turn on TM, then you can almost forget it. Still, it's good to consider a better strategy in which TM merely plays a part and isn't your only backup.

= Steve =

[Tom Robinson]

I agree Time Machine is the way to go if possible. And no need to fiddle, the default settings work well for the majority of users.

Of course this only provides an on-site backup and you should also have offsite. If you have the discipline Time Machine works just as well with two (or more) drives--just swap them every week or so and keep the other offsite. Otherwise there's good 'cloud' backup solutions like CrashPlan and Mozy.

Steve: Time Machine keeps hourly backups for 24 hours at which time the first backup of the previous day becomes that day's daily snapshot, ditto weekly. i.e. the daily and weekly backups contain files as at the snapshot date & time, not all files from that day/week.

There's no monthly backup; weekly backups are saved until the backup disk fills up at which time the oldest ones are automatically removed.

Cheers

[Al Poulin]

Originally Posted by Bob White

Then Jo needs to spend $29 (US) for Snow Leopard and start using Time Machine.

Technically, this will work. But doing it in Jo's case violates Apple's intent with its sales policy and license agreement. Apple puts us on the honor system in this regard. It sells the $29 version as an upgrade for Leopard users. For Tiger users, it sells its $169 version in a boxed bundle with iLife '09 and iWork '09. Both require an Intel machine. I know - there has been much criticism of Apple for this.

[Al Poulin]

Originally Posted by Jo Burns

Thanks, you two! I'm still using OSX 10.4.11, so Time Machine is out. I'll try .Me.

Any suggestions for external HD brands?

My wife finds that backing up to .Me is slow in spite of our high speed broadband service. What do others say?

As for brands, based on anecdotal comments, I prefer drives with Seagate or Hitachi mechanisms and disfavor Western Digital.

For shopping, it is useful to look at Other World Computing (OWC) whether you buy from them or not:
http://macsales.com/
They have a full range of offerings, prices are reasonable, and customer service is wholly satisfactory for the folks in elists that I follow. Their telephone personnel are knowledgeable and very helpful. Being Mac-oriented, their hard drives come formatted for Macintosh, whereas you'd have to reformat drives from most other vendors.
Small Dog Electronics is another Mac-oriented vendor:
http://www.smalldog.com/
Of course, there is the Apple Store, but some of their offerings are on the expensive side.

Consider a hard drive with several interfaces, especially if your present Mac has FireWire 400. Your next Mac may have FireWire 800 and/or USB 2. One advantage of an external hard drive is that you can clone your internal hard drive with SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC). With a clone, you can boot through any FireWire interface. You can boot through a USB 2 interface with newer Macs, but not with older ones. You cannot boot from a Time Machine backup. A clone comes in handy if your internal drive fails. You boot from the external drive and go back to work.

For backups in our home, we use Time Machine to one external drive, and CCC to another every week or so. Also, I occasionally make DVD backups of some files to hold in another home.

[martha]

Originally Posted by Steve W. Jackson

And I'm going to disagree with the advice to use TimeMachineEditor or any other tool to tinker with the backup scheduling.

Why? Because unless you use certain software that creates *very* large files on a frequent basis that you don't want backed up, and unless those files are not in a place you can tell Time Machine to ignore, it already does an outstanding job of managing the backups without any tweaking. It backs up hourly. After the hourly backups are 24 hours old, it consolidates them into a single backup for that day without losing anything. And once those daily backups are a month old, it does the same with them, consolidating into a single monthly backup which contains every item backed up in the month.

Otherwise, even if you really do have a legitimate need to tinker with the frequency of backups, it's difficult to find a simpler backup mechanism than this one. Get yourself a Time Capsule or attach a large external drive and turn on TM, then you can almost forget it. Still, it's good to consider a better strategy in which TM merely plays a part and isn't your only backup.

= Steve =

Well, now I am very curious. I don't keep my external disc connected to my laptop [the only modern computer that I own] because I actually use the laptop as a laptop and am nowhere near my desk where the external disc is located. Every few days I connect it and have Time Machine back up the laptop. My question is this: will it still consolidate and do everything you mentioned, Steve, even if I don't do daily backups? [Daily backups are done automatically via wifi to Mozy.]

Martha

[Al Poulin]

Originally Posted by martha

Well, now I am very curious. I don't keep my external disc connected to my laptop [the only modern computer that I own] because I actually use the laptop as a laptop and am nowhere near my desk where the external disc is located. Every few days I connect it and have Time Machine back up the laptop. My question is this: will it still consolidate and do everything you mentioned, Steve, even if I don't do daily backups? [Daily backups are done automatically via wifi to Mozy.]

Martha

Not Steve, but the answer is: yes, for each snapshot that you allow it to take. And, as previously mentioned, it is best to use Time Machine as one part of a backup strategy. It is not bootable, but it works well as designed most of the time. Using Time Machine, my son has fully recovered to a replacement hard drive when one of his week-old hard drives died. It is great for quickly recovering a file which you inadvertently deleted or which was somehow damaged. Early implementations of Time Machine suffered various glitches. Since then, it has become more stable, but I have not yet seen Mac experts voice full confidence that it is bullet proof. I will check an elist and come back on this.

[Steve W. Jackson]

Originally Posted by Tom Robinson

I agree Time Machine is the way to go if possible. And no need to fiddle, the default settings work well for the majority of users.

Of course this only provides an on-site backup and you should also have offsite. If you have the discipline Time Machine works just as well with two (or more) drives--just swap them every week or so and keep the other offsite. Otherwise there's good 'cloud' backup solutions like CrashPlan and Mozy.

Steve: Time Machine keeps hourly backups for 24 hours at which time the first backup of the previous day becomes that day's daily snapshot, ditto weekly. i.e. the daily and weekly backups contain files as at the snapshot date & time, not all files from that day/week.

There's no monthly backup; weekly backups are saved until the backup disk fills up at which time the oldest ones are automatically removed.

Cheers

I stand corrected about the monthly backups. You're correct that there are no monthly backups done. I've also misunderstood some material I read which suggested that those post-backup thinning sessions were "consolidating" things when in fact they're not. So each "daily" will include all things remaining on a system as of the time taken, which means that some short-lived files might not be retained -- not usually an issue.

But Time Machine is indeed a good solution for many. And I completely agree that it should only be a part of a larger backup scheme to protect that important family history and other data!

[Steve W. Jackson]

Originally Posted by Al Poulin

Not Steve, but the answer is: yes, for each snapshot that you allow it to take. And, as previously mentioned, it is best to use Time Machine as one part of a backup strategy. It is not bootable, but it works well as designed most of the time. Using Time Machine, my son has fully recovered to a replacement hard drive when one of his week-old hard drives died. It is great for quickly recovering a file which you inadvertently deleted or which was somehow damaged. Early implementations of Time Machine suffered various glitches. Since then, it has become more stable, but I have not yet seen Mac experts voice full confidence that it is bullet proof. I will check an elist and come back on this.

Quite right.

I have a Time Capsule so that my laptop can invoke Time Machine at any time throughout my house. But I've set it not to do backups when I unplug and run on the battery. And, of course, I close the lid and let it sleep overnight. So it's not at all uncommon for me to open the lid first thing in the morning, or plug it back in after returning from battery use, and see it suddenly begin a backup if I've been away for longer than the requisite one hour period. Time Machine never misses a beat for me.

It has very definitely become more stable and reliable since the first release. But, as has already been said elsewhere in this thread, it's a good idea to have a bigger strategy and simply use TM as part of it. Some I know use TM combined with Super Duper! or Carbon Copy Cloner, since these produce bootable backups. They often rotate external drives with one or the other of these backups to a safe off-site location, or fireproof safe, and rely on TM for less catastrophic protection. But developing a good strategy is definitely wise.

[Tom Robinson]

While you can't boot from a Time Machine backup you can instead boot from an OS X install DVD and choose to restore the entire computer from Time Machine at that stage.

I've been using TM since Snow Leopard and it's always been reliable and stable--with the exception of FileVault. TM is meant to backup a FileVault protected account at logout (which itself is a bit of a drag) but occasionally forgets to. I've got a bug open with Apple about it.

Cheers

[martha]

Originally Posted by Al Poulin

Not Steve, but the answer is: yes, for each snapshot that you allow it to take. And, as previously mentioned, it is best to use Time Machine as one part of a backup strategy. It is not bootable, but it works well as designed most of the time. Using Time Machine, my son has fully recovered to a replacement hard drive when one of his week-old hard drives died. It is great for quickly recovering a file which you inadvertently deleted or which was somehow damaged. Early implementations of Time Machine suffered various glitches. Since then, it has become more stable, but I have not yet seen Mac experts voice full confidence that it is bullet proof. I will check an elist and come back on this.

Many thanks to you, Al! and later to all who have contributed to this discussion!

Martha