Backing Up My Mac Internal Drive

[mrwonderful]

Hi Folks!
I am soon to be backing up my Mac computer internal drive for the first time. My version, 10.4.11 Tiger, predates the ‘Time Machine’ app so I don’t have it. Basically how do I do a backup? This is a great computer dating from late ’07 and as we all know nothing lasts forever. Here’s some points re my situation as-is:

It seems there's two types of backups, the files/documents themselves, and the applications that are used to create those files/documents. There's apps that came with the Mac, and a few I added on. Can't I just GET a backup drive and drag-and-drop everything over? EVERYTHING that's on the Mac? Couldn't it be that simple?

I am VERY careful to keep up with backing up all my music 'documents' from the existing EXTERNAL drive to my backup drive. This really paid off last summer when, 3/4 of the way thru my recording project, my #1 drive started to go. I pulled everything from its backup and dragged-and-dropped it all to my new #2 drive, which went pretty slick. So, to re-state the question in the previous paragraph...Can't I just use the same procedure when backing up from what's inside the Mac - EVERYTHING - to ITS dedicated backup drive?

When I right-click on the desktop icon 'Macintosh HD' I get a dropdown box with some options. Some of those options could potentially be relevant. Those options are: 1) Duplicate (duplicate WHAT?) 2) Make Alias (not sure that's relevant) and 3) 'Copy Mac HD', which could be useful. I will be exploring these next.

For the record, I'm showing right now a capacity of 148.61 gigs, used 86.97, and still available 61.63. I know computers become unhappy when they start running close to capacity, so it's time to think about this. Also it's time to think about a newer computer...but hopefully I can buy some time before I HAVE to replace this one...or at least some peace of mind knowing I can recover data should something happen.

I would appreciate anyone’s thoughts on this…I'm still pretty much a kindergartener here, and as such, well, I only hope my questions aren't too dumb or off-mark. Then again, there's NO dumb questions as far as a kindergartener is concerned!

I wish I knew these things intuitively…I’m blessed to have a considerable musical gift, and Mac/Protools is my way to use it. But just because I know how to drive a car doesn’t mean I have to be a transmission specialist…right?

Pennies for your thoughts…and best regards…George Wallace

[andygabrys]

hey George,

there are as many backup schemes as there are people on this forum.

my advice would be to find a way to automate the backups. yes Time Machine works. but another option is Carbon Copy Cloner which I have used for years, and its great. Its current version only supports OSX 10.6 and above, but they have a legacy version available that supports old OSX 10.5 and 10.4

http://www.bombich.com/download.html

I backup stuff every three hours on an automatic schedule, which has proven frequently enough for me. the system drive backup is an exact clone of my sytem drive. the backups for other things like Audio projects are incremental backups where it saves the changes backup to backup in a log which you can access. This has saved my bacon a number of times when I did stupid things and deleted something etc. I can always find plenty of versions.

my preference is to backup from my Mac-HD system drive to another drive dedicated solely to that purpose. the reason being I can just change the startup target drive to my backup and be working in 5 minutes if there is a failure on my primary system drive. And the backup is a different drive from my audio backup drive, so I don't try to make the drive do too much at once.

I have other drives that are dedicated solely to backup audio projects and other stuff. I also have an external Mirror RAID enclosure that I use for archiving music projects that don't exist anywhere on my computer setup. Its wise to never consider a file actually "safe" unless its in two separate places - eg, on your audio drive, and backed up to the "cloud", or on your audio drive and backed up to another audio drive etc.

you said

I'm showing right now a capacity of 148.61 gigs, used 86.97, and still available 61.63

.

You are already at the threshold where performances degrades significantly. mechanical hard drive performance falls fast once you have 50% of the available space filled. Buy another backup drive.

www.macsales.com has many relatively economical external single and duel RAID type hard drive schemes.

Other options you might consider if you want cloud backups:

www.gobbler.com

http://www.carbonite.com/lp/media/banne ... MgodSC8AKA


hope that helps. btw I am on a mac pro which has plenty of internal drives (6 actually using a data doubler from OWC / Macsales). If you can get one before they disappear with the new model due late this year, you might enjoy having all that hard drive power.

[EricB]

I agree with Andy. Always have your stuff backed up on multiple drives. I also use Justcloud for automatic cloud back-ups. It checks everything on my computer daily. On top of that I'm running time machine to a real hard drive. Don't risk losing your hard work!

[andygabrys]

I agree with Andy. Always have your stuff backed up on multiple drives. I also use Justcloud for automatic cloud back-ups. It checks everything on my computer daily. On top of that I'm running time machine to a real hard drive. Don't risk losing your hard work!

hey Eric,

how does the pricing actually work on justcloud.com? I see you get a free account, and although it says unlimited storage, it mentions something much less in another place.

then the business plans seem much more modest.

help?

[EricB]

Hey Andy,
I don't know too much about all the different plans they have. I believe the trial version only allows you to upload around 5GB. The highest plan they have has unlimited storage. They were one of the only ones I found that even offer unlimited storage. If you use a coupon it ends up being farely cheap.

If you search for a justcloud coupon on google a link to the justcloud website will show up with the label "secret link." This will take you to a page that will get you 35% off. From there I just got the unlimited plan for two years. Ends up being around $7 a month. I don't remember specifically what my plan was called. They offer you a bunch of extras when you check out to try and jack up your bill. The only one I bought increases your max file size to 5GB.

Let me know if you have any questions.

[mrwonderful]

A thousand thanks for all your input!

It is quite apparent that NOW is the time to do SOMETHING. I have a sense that you (collectively) are on your respective rigs more hours-per-week than I am right now. (I don't sell time to clients, my system is solely for my own projects as it turns out, and also I just finished a major project - I'm in sort of a 'fallow' period between projects which I plan to be out of soon, hence the timing of this backup task.)

But regardless, it's time to make this happen. Roger that about performance starting to be compromised via the ever-decreasing disk space. This particular Mac shows no signs of a problem - yet - but I've always been one to keep things real 'clean' there in the box, which hopefully buys me some time; I've been real lucky with this Mac.

I'll chck out Carbon Copy Cloner...I'm a bit weird I guess, maybe the better term is uncomfortable - about sending anything to the cloud - it's the principle of the thing, I think. I know everybody's got stuff up there, I am just still hesitant by instinct.

But anyway, thanks for your generous feedback, all is duly noted!!!

And by the way, I like this quote: "What would you do if you knew you wouldn't fail?" An interesting question...

all the best, G W

[Casey H]

Hey Mr. W
I always suggest at least one backup on a external hard drive on site and another cloud based one. That way in case of fire, flood, theft, etc (which might take out everything you have on location), you still have another option. Too many people have everything they own only in one room in their house. Something off-site is always needed in case of disaster.

You coming to the rally this year again?

Best,
Casey

[TimWalter]

When I went to Ronan Murphy's Recording Boot camp in late July/early Aug, one of his guest speakers was his friend John Rodd, an engineer who had just finished doing all the score recording and mixing for the movie Elysium, a summer blockbuster with Matt Damon that was getting ready be released. Naturally, we in class were all familiar with the movie, due to the heavy advertising going on at that time prior to its release, so we waited with bated breath to hear what juicy nuggets of truth John was going to drop on us. His main message was "BACK UP YOUR STUFF". He gave a lecture that lasted probably 20 to 25 minutes about "its not IF the hard drive will fail, but when". His opinion, data doesn't exist if it doesn't exist in at least 3 locations (eg 3 hard drives). He commented that after recording a full on symphony orchestra in Abby Road studios in London for Elysium, with 40+ microphones, etc, if he had lost that data after returning to LA, well, its obvious that the negative consequences to his career would been dire. He said (jokingly) that he has made it such a mantra, that when he goes through the drive through at Starbucks, burger king, et al, he asks the cashier if they've backed up their hard drive today (lol). He actually made a pretty boring and tedious topic interesting and memorable. (cuz after all, backing up your hard drives is probably last on most of our to do list priorities, right down there with cleaning the studio toilets.)

He suggested Carbon Copy Cloner, encouraging us to have a bootable copy of our hard drive, just as Andy so eloquently described. Audio data elsewhere, same as Andy's system.


Tim