NathanBowers.com

Someday your hard drive will die. You need a backup strategy that’s bulletproof and easy.

Please note that while I will be talking about Mac OS X backup methods, the overall strategy applies to other operating systems too.

• Live your life on one laptop hard drive volume. When your iTunes library lives on one external hard drive, and your photos on another partition, and your documents on yet another, there is too much complexity for painless backups. If backups aren’t painless you won’t do them. Unless you’re a film or video professional your digital life should easily fit on a laptop with a 250GB drive.
• Backups must be bootable¹. When trouble strikes you won’t want to buy a replacement hard drive, install it, install your OS, install all your applications, migrate your documents over from an external backup, and redo all your preferences. Instead you’ll want to be able to immediately boot and work from your external backup and then install a new hard drive to restore to at your convenience.
• You’ll need SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner² to make quick bootable backups. Leopard’s built in Time Machine is great, but it doesn’t create bootable backups. You can use Disk Utility to make bootable backups on external drives but Disk Utility just blindly copies over your entire hard drive instead of only changed files, and that takes hours. Once you’ve taken the initial 2 hour hit of creating a backup with SuperDuper or CCC, subsequent “smart” backups will take 5-20 minutes. SuperDuper unfortunately doesn’t work with Leopard yet, but the SuperDuper developers have promised that when it does it will work seamlessly with TimeMachine to give you the best of both programs [UPDATE - Feb 5, 2008: SuperDuper now works with Leopard].
• You need two external hard drives, one of which is stored several miles off site. At least one backup has to be out of reach of thieves, fire, or other neighborhood-wide disasters. The easiest thing is to keep one backup locked in your desk at work and rotate it frequently with your home backup.
• Use bus-powered external hard drives. It’s much easier to travel with backup drives when they’re tiny and don’t require a power brick³.
• Use external hard drives of the same type (SATA or IDE) as your internal hard drive. This isn’t critical, but it’s nice to be able to drop one of your backup drives into your laptop and just have it work.
• Backup at least once a week to each external drive and use scheduling or other means to automate the process. SuperDuper and CCC both offer scheduling. CCC can automatically backup when you plug in a specific external hard drive.
• Every so often boot from your bootable backups to ensure that they are in fact working.

If you’ve got questions, additional backup advice, recommendations for PC users, or data loss/recovery horror stories, say so in the comments.

1. Shirt Pocket Software blog post on why bootable backups are crucial.
2. Carbon Copy Cloner works, but I much prefer SuperDuper for ease of use and functional clarity. I got CCC to make a bootable backup that syncs instead of stupidly copying over everything, but the option to do so is really non-obvious. You have to select “copy selected items” in the cloning options drop down [screenshot] and make sure your entire source disk is selected instead of using the default “copy everything from source to target” which sounds good but isn’t what you want. Ugh. SuperDuper’s interface is much better.
3. Cautionary tale: Annie’s hard drive died at her hotel the night before she was to give a big presentation. Ouch. Having a bootable backup on hand would have made this a minor inconvenience. Instead she endured a nightmare of finding an available Apple Store Genius Bar in a strange city.

A note about security and encryption: I didn’t say anything about encrypting your data when you back it up. The only really sensitive data I have are logins and credit card numbers in Keychain so they are already encrypted. My stored Firefox logins are protected with a master password. If you have a lot of sensitive documents that must be stored encrypted you can:

• Turn on FileVault to encrypt your home directory.
• Keep sensitive files in an encrypted disk image.
• Backup to an encrypted disk image with SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner (though this means that your backups won’t be bootable and you’ll have to use your OS X install disk to boot and restore from the encrypted disk image).
• I haven’t tested restoring from these encryption options so research and verify before relying on them.