You have got me thinking – is my back up strategy fatally flawed or not.

So this may or may not be of interest to you…

But, either way I’m going to share it with you.

We are one mac household. As you know I have a macbook intel core duo 60gig drive. Not a lot of hard disk space! Currently have 20 available.

There two areas on my mac I consider worth backing up. They are photo’s, videos, general family media and my personal work. I include reviews and work I do for friends and family in this category.

You will note Music is absent. Well until just before Christmas I wasn’t an iTunes user. Since then I have bought probably £25.00 worth of music so it’s something I’m aware I need to consider. If I were to lose data I have the CD’s in a cupboard somewhere. Pain in the proverbial but I don’t listen to whole lot of music more of a podcast kind of guy.

I have one external drive. A Lacie 500g Quad Interface and she’s a beauty. I’ve had her a few months a generally very happy. Can be a bit noisy but I expected that.

This has two partitions. 125 gig and another bit roughly 350 gig.

The 125 gig is my clone partition. Why 125 gig when you only have a 60 gig drive? Well, forward thinking on my part mainly. I am going to be installing a new larger hard drive in the MacBook in the coming months.

I clone through CCC and run an incremental back up once a week. Yes you can do incremental backups in CCC.

See TMUP blog for more info here’s the link: http://tinyurl.com/2rc5lz

This drive is in the house and normally in the den or downstairs with the laptop. In terms of theft, probably not very secure. I see this back up more as drive failure protection.

Photos
Apart from the clone. I burn DVD’s of my entire photo collection. Currently two DVD’s worth and then duplicate it. One set put away in the house and another set off site. I have literally just done this for 2005-2007. Only problem with that is what do I do with in the time between now and the end of year.

What I think I might do is use my remaining Mozy FREE entitlement for this in the interim. This depends on how many photos I take this year. To be honest I’m pretty brutal with my photography selections. I know the beauty of digital is that you can shoot, shoot and shoot some more. But I tend to edit them down, down and down some more before importing them into iPhoto. You can also apply this backup strategy to video. I don’t have a video camera bit I do shoot some mini videos on my Lumix snappy camera.

Once I swap out the 60 gig drive from the MaBook I will also be duplicating the Photo’s and Personal Work on a regular basis to that and keeping it off site.

Personal Work
My work folder weighs in at approx 1 gig. Obviously it gets cloned. As well as that I use Mozy as an off-site solution. I will be honest it took me a while to get the 1 gig up on Mozy, but in the end it was worth it. Now all it does is check for updated/new files and then it does it stuff in the background. I use a FREE Mozy account with a 2.5 gig allowance.

So where does Time Machine factor into this? Well it doesn’t as I am still running Tiger. When I upgrade, probably when the MacBook drive swaps out, I will install Leopard. Time Machine will backup to my 325gig partition on the Lacie.

I am a .mac user. Have I tried using it as a reliable backup soluiton? Yes. But it repeatedly failed on me. To be honest I gave up trying.

Phew that’s it. This was intended to be a short reply to yet another great post from Mr. Sparks but it kind of grew. Apologies.

Darren

In addition, the ReadyNAS has a (2) USB2 ports to connect a backup drive for itself so I have one button secondary backup at will. My big concern is the family digital video files, family pics, and my music collection (which is quite large).

Needless to say, it wasn’t cheap, but I felt like I needed a non-cluttered, secure solution to protect all of the time, effort, and memories of the last 10 years or so of digital media that I have stored.