Comments on: Are You Making This Common Mistake (That Could Ruin Your Business)?

By: Lou Gonzales

Lou Gonzales — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 21:05:26 +0000

What great advice! I personally use an external drive but thanks to your article I’ll be looking into Jungle disk ASAP.
Thanks Erica I look forward to returning here.
Thanks again,
Lou Gonzales

By: J

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 22:56:28 +0000

I have been looking at some reviews (http://www.macworld.com/article/142606/2009/09/online_backup.html) and it seems Crashplan has a pretty good deal in that it is $54 a year but includes unlimited storage.

@Travis Isaacs- Crashplan allows you to have the physical media sent for restore and if you have a ton of files to start, you can seed your backup with a 1 TB drive you send in.

@Dale and Helen Clement- Let me know if Mozy works well on restore, I read a review (http://wonko.com/post/crashplan_status_report_still_awesome) that while it seems to backup great, restore is not pretty (http://wonko.com/post/it_turns_out_mozy_isnt_so_hot_after_all)

@Erica- Thanks so much for this post, I signed up for Jungle Disk on my laptop and have been very satisfied. I have been looking at others like Crashplan which are much cheaper if the amount of data being stored is in the Terabytes range like our lab computers, while also being able to provide prompt restore.

By: Pace

Pace — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 19:44:12 +0000

I just downloaded Jungle Disk and am setting it up now. Thanks muchly for the recommendation! (:

By: N.Jonathan Christopher

N.Jonathan Christopher — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 10:38:04 +0000

Thank you for the info. Many people who run small businesses and other people who use computers where important data is stored will probably listen to what you are saying and take your suggestions as well as those that the other comment writers have provided. Backing up critical data is important for many but they sometimes take it lightly to their own trouble.
-Jonathan

By: ed

ed — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 11:50:34 +0000

While I’ve been lucky & not suffer catastrophic loss of data, I saw what happened to a colleague & his notebook. The hard disc crashed while thw notebook was the process of being shut down & he snapped the cover shut a bit too hard.

Since then, at least I back up to an external drive every so often. The data that I work on is not that crucial but then again, you never know. See this, I think i better back up files on the server.

By: Nostradoofus

Nostradoofus — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 16:32:21 +0000

Don’t forget to back up your Gmail. As more people move to Google hosted IMAP mail, this becomes more important. I keep a server at home that runs “imapsync” every night. It updates incrementally, and is thus very fast after the first night.

A very easy backup solution for solo workers with an office: MacBook plus Time Capsule. Bring the laptop home every night. Presto, offsite backup you don’t have to think about.

By: Khyron

Khyron — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 07:49:30 +0000

Make sure you test your backups from time to time as well.

Working for a large hosting company, you see this kind of thing all the time. A few years ago, we had to engage Veritas (now Symantec) support about a problem with a restore from Veritas NetBackup. For those who are unaware, Veritas NetBackup is one of the PREMIER backup and restore applications, in the rarified air of enterprise backup solutions. Anyway, when engaged, apparently the support engineer (or whomever was contacted; as I was not involved, I don’t know the specifics) told our admin “Veritas NetBackup is a backup product NOT a restore product”.

Well, the backups are pointless if you can’t restore them.

So make sure that you can. Test restores often, and I’d advise randomly, from whatever your backup solution is.

I personally use Mozy for my MacBook Pro, but whatever you use, make sure backups AND restores will work.

P.S.: Erica – Disqus or Intense Debate for comments maybe?

By: Dale

Dale — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 03:43:32 +0000

I highly recommend Mozy. I have an unlimited account for $5/mo. It works great and automatically backups overnight.

By: James Sutherland

James Sutherland — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 21:41:49 +0000

I’ve been using Time Machine for a while – I lost the backup to FS corruption when I was backing up to a drive on my Airport Extreme, but it’s been fine with a local disk. That will give nice fast restores of anything from one file to the whole system. I used Mozy and Carbonite on my systems as well, but they can take a ridiculously long time to back up and restore data – and my last big Mozy restore said it had missed 3 files, but didn’t specify which!

I’m in the process of changing my setup around; I’m planning to move to ZFS on my laptop, backed up frequently (zfs send) onto the big desktop/server, then back that up nightly to s3sync or similar. At $10/month for 100 Gb (plus the bandwidth charges while syncing) it seems quite suitable. For most situations, I’ll have instant access to local snapshots; worst case, I’m pulling the data back out of S3, which should give decent speeds and reliability.

By: Cath Lawson

Cath Lawson — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 12:17:32 +0000

Hi Erica – What a disaster but thanks for the great advice. Two businesses ago, our system began crashing at the end of every month. And because I was hopeless at remembering to back up every day – I’d wind up working the whole weekend, re-entering the last few days jobs on the system.

After that I used Salesforce, because I decided it was safer if someone else was storing everything for me. But I do worry about the security of Internet based systems.

Your way sounds like a pretty good one and something that non-technical people like me can easily understand. Thanks.