Building a Backup Strategy
My brother is a new mac user, and is starting to get into recording and audio engineer stuff I don't know anything about. I know he has lots of big files though, and needs to know how to back them up. So I was telling him about my current backup strategy, and figured I should write up a post about it for posterity's sake.
Local vs. Remote
So there are essentially two ways you can go about doing backups. You can either backup locally (and by this I mean inside your home) or remotely (to a server outside your home). There are pluses and minuses to both methods.
Local Backups
Local backups are fast. If you're backing up locally it's either to another drive attached to your computer, an ethernet cable, or your local wireless network. This means data is moving fast, and you can backup large amounts of data quickly.
Being a Mac guy, I use a 1TB Time Capsule to handle my local backups. I backup my entire machine so that I can revert the whole thing back to any point in time (give or take an hour). This also means that I have a backup of the state of all of my applications. This is essentially a clone of my hard drive made every hour. If my laptop burned to a crisp, I could be back up and running as if nothing happened as soon as I got a new machine on my desk.
The main disadvantage of local backup is that they're in the same location as your computer. If your laptop gets burned to a crisp, there's a fair chance that your Time Capsule went with it along with your house...
The other disadvantage is that unless you have a way to get into your network from outside your home you don't have access to your backups. Setting up a VPN through your router can solve this problem, but this is generally more trouble than the average user (including myself) is willing t endure.
Remote Backups
For this reason, I also have remote backups. A remote backups usually happens over FTP or some other WAN-style connection over the internet. This means it's going to be slower and more painful to back things up.
To make remote backups less painful I schedule these nightly while I'm asleep, and I only backup my documents, not my entire machine. To make this happen I use an application called Jungle Disk. Jungle Disk uses Amazon's S3 Storage Service for backup storage. This means that you can leverage the power and reliability of Amazon's vast network to back up your data. So each night at 2am, Jungle Disk backs up all of the changed files in my Documents, Downloads, Desktop and iTunes folders.
The chief disadvantage here is speed. The initial backup of all of my documents took several days, with a number of stops and starts due to network lag. But once all of that was complete, Jungle Disk performed like a champ. It just runs in the background, and I don't have to worry about it.
Now not considering speed, remote backups are great... Not only are they extremely reliable (depending on your provider), but they are also available remotely. What that means is that if I'm out of town and need a backup copy of a file, I can just fire up Jungle Disk and browse my backups on Amazon's server from anywhere I have an internet connection.
Wrapping up
As knowledge workers, our computers are our livelihood. Our work is stored in bits and bytes on fragile hard drives that could be toast at any moment. Protecting that knowledge and years of email, notes, and work is important. If you don't already have a backup strategy in place, you should do it now. A Time Capsule is cheap considering you get a router and a terabyte of storage, and Jungle Disk (which works on Windows, Linux, and Mac) is just $20 plus the cost of storage at Amazon (which is amazingly cheap).