Why Doesn’t Anybody Backup Their Computer?

At the risk of being repetitive, I’ll remind you guys that I’ve been in the IT business for over 30 years. In that time, I’ve been called at least a hundred times by people whose computer crashed or is in some sort of un-bootable condition. The first question I ask is, “Do you have a recent backup?” With only one exception in all that time, the answer has been, “No.”

This bewilders me. For the life of me I can’t understand why, when backing up is so easy and inexpensive. This is especially true for Mac owners. Apple has included Time Machine with OS X for ten years. Like everything Apple makes, Time Machine is the simplest and most user-friendly backup system imaginable. If you bought a Mac, you spent at least $700 ($499 Mac Mini, $200 for cheap monitor, mouse & keyboard). Why wouldn’t you spend another $60 for a USB drive to keep your data safe in case the worst happens. It’s not like it takes a big effort to set it up. You simply plug the drive into one of your Mac’s USB ports and when OS X pops up a dialog asking if you’d like to use the drive for Time Machine you click “Yes”. That’s it! Admittedly, a Time Machine backup isn’t the most flexible or robust, but it’s light years ahead of “nuthin”.  Even the knuckleheads in Redmond finally caught on. Windows has included free backup software since Vista. It’s not the easiest to setup and use, but hey, it’s Microsoft. At least the price is right.

Most external hard drives you buy these days comes with some home-grown backup software right on the disk, yet people still refuse to use it. Things have gotten a little better with the proliferation of cloud services offered by dozens of companies. At least people who keep things on Dropbox or Google Drive for sharing or convenience don’t lose those files when their hard drive eats itself. And make no mistake. ALL hard drives eat themselves eventually. The jury is still out, but it’s looking like the same goes for SSDs. I owned a 256 GB Crucial SSD that simply quit working after 14 months. No errors. No warning. Just POOF! The good news: I was using it as a Time Machine disk. The only thing I lost was my backup and I quickly replaced it.

When it comes to backing up, I’m a “belt & suspenders” guy. I subscribe to the 3-2-1 backup methodology as a minimum. That translates to 3 copies of your data on at least 2 separate physical devices with one copy in a different location. That’s 1) the original files, 2) a copy of the files on an external USB drive and 3) another copy of the files either on a USB drive kept off-site or stored in the cloud. I go one step further keeping both a USB drive for a Time Machine backup and a second USB for a complete clone of my boot disk made using SuperDuper!  Time Machine facilitates versioning to some degree. It keeps hourly incremental backups and allows me to “go back in time” to grab a version of a file I worked on sometime in the past. I have SuperDuper! scheduled to make a daily clone of my system disk that I can boot from should my system disk go tits-up.  I have had occasion to use it. It wasn’t because my hard drive crashed. I installed a beta version of OS X that completely FUBARd my Mac. I booted from my clone and wiped and restored my system disk. It took about an hour and a half and my Mac was back to the way it was the previous day before I installed the beta.

I have a saying: “Everyone loses all their data ONCE.” Yes, it happened to the MacTexan, too. I was fortunate in that it happened to me early in my computing life back in 1990. I didn’t have a recent backup, but the computer was only 3 months old and I still had my old machine. The 3 months I’d spent installing software and creating documents went down the drain, though. It was painful, but it taught me a valuable lesson and since then my backup routine could best be described as “anal”. A former co-worker of mine wasn’t so lucky. This guy was my second in command when I was the IT manager for a 120 user site. I had put together a very thorough backup scheme replete with a 20-tape carousel, two NAS devices for local backup and a safe deposit box at the bank for monthly off-site tape storage. When I retired, this gent was promoted to my old position. 18 months later my old boss called me out of retirement to “fix” the mess the IT department had become. It seems the SAN (Storage Area Network, a big disk array that all the servers booted from and where all the user data was stored) had crashed some weeks earlier and my former second hadn’t been keeping up with the backups. Six months of the company’s data turned to ether. This person is no longer employed by my former company. You see, in the IT business no one gets in trouble for not backing up data, but you get fired when you’re unable to restore it! Rightly so. Think about what it costs to pay 120 people to recreate 6 months’ work. There’s absolutely no excuse for a professional making this mistake, but the damage you could incur should your computer experience a catastrophic failure may be proportionally just as bad (or worse). Just think about everything on your computer. Pictures, video, music, financial data, legal documents…the list goes on. Now imagine your computer is lost, stolen, destroyed or suffers an un-recoverable disk crash. Do you have a means of recovering your stuff?

Ask yourself these questions:

1 )   Do you know when you last fully backed up your computer?

2 )   Do you keep a copy of your data in another location or in the cloud?

3 )   Have you tested the integrity of your backup recently?

If you answered “no” to any of these questions, then your backup plan needs work. I’ve described how I do it, but my methods are admittedly a bit extreme. The first thing I recommend for all Mac users is to buy a USB drive and configure it for Time Machine. It is the easiest backup method by far and includes the added benefit of maintaining multiple versions of files. Next, sign up for an on-line backup service. The three I’ve used with great success are Carbonite, CrashPlan and iBackup. They all have iPhone and Android apps for accessing your files remotely, plus intuitive web interfaces. Each have their pluses and minuses, so make your choice based on price and personal preference. On-line backup is a great hedge in case of theft, fire or other natural disasters that cause loss of your equipment and data. Just be cognoscente of the fact that your backups and restores will happen at Internet speed. Multiple gigs of data could take several days to completely backup or restore. Next I really like disk cloning software. As I mentioned, I use SuperDuper!, but Carbon Copy Cloner works great also. Each can be configured to create complete, bootable clones of your disk, scheduled periodically as you prefer. They also have some sort of “smart” cloning feature that only modifies the files that have changed since the last cloning. I schedule SuperDuper! to run daily at 2 AM. It works without fail. This is another aspect of backing up I cannot stress enough: Whichever backup system(s) you choose, make sure backups happen automatically! If you have to remember to back up, IT WON'T HAPPEN. At least not on a consistent basis. Also, test the integrity of your backup occasionally. Try restoring a file or group of files to make sure everything is working as you'd expect. If you clone your system disk, try booting from it from time to time. A currupt backup is the same as no backup at all.

Whatever portion of these recommendations you choose to follow, do something! Don’t be one of those idiots who answers “no”. 

Comments

[Bill Frick]

Beats me too!