You value your data. Right? Of course you do. But do you actually have a strategy to back it up and keep it safe? I’m guessing not. Today is a good day to come up with a strategy as it is World Backup Day which is a day to remind you that having a good backup strategy is a great idea 365 days a year. If you don’t presently have a back up strategy, you might want to click the link as it will give you all sorts of reasons why you should and discounts to online backup services. If that isn’t enough, I’ll toss in my two articles on the subject as I am a big believer in making sure you have a backup strategy.
Archive for Backup
Today Is World Backup Day….. Which Means You Should Think About Backing Up Your Data
Posted in Tips with tags Backup on March 31, 2017 by itnerdWorld Backup Day Is 7 Days Away….. Will You Back Up Your Digital Life?
Posted in Tips with tags Backup on March 24, 2015 by itnerdMarch 31st is World Backup Day. And as I’ve said many times before, everyone who uses a computer or a smartphone should back up their data. No, ifs ands or buts. Now if you need help backing up your Mac or PC, I’ve provided a couple of links for Mac and PC for your reading pleasure. I’ll also write something up in terms of backing up iOS and Android devices as well. But please have a backup strategy for your digital life as you never know when disaster will strike.
My Mac Fell And Couldn’t Get Up
Posted in Commentary with tags Backup, Mac on July 1, 2014 by itnerdToday is…. Or as I type this was Canada Day where we Canadians have the day off to celebrate the founding of our country. I had planned to get up early and check a few things on my computer. Then relax and enjoy the day. But when I got to the computer, I found that SuperDuper which is my backup app of choice had not fully backed the hard drive up overnight automatically as it has crashed part way through with an I/O error of some sort. Not only that, the computer was really slow. It’s never slow. So I restarted it.
It never came back up. It instead kernel panicked because it was allegedly missing a driver. Now I had installed an update to OS X Mavericks last night (the 10.9.4 update to be specific), so I was thinking that this was the cause. But I decided to do my due diligence and test the hardware first. I used disk utility to scan the hard drive for errors after I ran Apple Hardware Test to make sure I had no issues. None appeared. So I then tried to do a reinstall of the operating system using the recovery partition. My logic was that I could get back up and running within an hour or so if I did.
No such luck there. It kernel panicked during the install. That left me with no choice but to erase the disk using disk utility and reinstall from scratch. Now some of you will wonder why I would not do a restore from backup. The reason is simple. At this point, I was suspecting that there might have been a pre-existing condition prior to the install of the OS X Mavericks update. Thus I would be able to get up and running, but I might be asking for trouble down the road. Therefore it was better to start from scratch. I could still recover my documents and e-mail from the backup without affecting anything else, it would just take a long time. Thus I took a deep breath and erased my hard disk and installed OS X Mavericks fresh. It worked. And as a bonus, it installed 10.9.4 saving me the trouble of having to do that later.
From here I had to do the following in order:
- Set up iCloud as this will restore my Apple Keychain file, bookmarks, contacts, calendar entries, notes and to-do items.
- Install all of my applications such as iLife, MS Office, and Parallels Desktop. I also had to make sure they were all up to date as well.
- Pull the files from the backup and put them in the Documents, Photos, Music, and Movies folders. This took a long time as there was almost 100GB of stuff here.
- Find the obscure location of the files for my accounting program and restore those from the backup. Hint to software developers on the Mac platform: Make your files easy to find by putting them in the documents folder.
- Restore my e-mail from the backup to where it is supposed to be so that it is accessible to Apple Mail. If you need to do this on a Mac, this will help you find the location of your e-mail. Hint to Apple, make e-mail from Apple Mail easy to find and to restore. The average person isn’t going to do the steps outlined in that document without some hand holding.
- Customize my Mac to make it behave the way it was before this happened.
- Run Disk Utility again to check the permissions and verify that there are no file system related issues lurking about.
- Backup everything so that I have a baseline reference. That took 5.5 hours.
- Test everything.
- Declare victory and have a beer.
To give you an idea of how long this whole process took from diagnosis to having a working Mac, I discovered this at 7AM this morning. Just after 9PM, I was back in business. But it could have been much worse had I not had the backups to work from. Thus this proves that you should back up often, as in daily. In the past, I wrote two articles on the subject of backing up. The first being for PC and the second for Mac users. You might want to take a look at them so that you can protect yourself. One good side effect is that this effectively gave me a fresh and speedy install of OS X that occupies 15 GB less than it normally does. The reason being was that the previous install was ported over from my previous Mac. So who knows what was there occupying space.
Still, it was a wasted day. Computer problems are never fun. Here’s hoping that I don’t have to do this again any time soon.
Hey IT Nerd! What Do You Think Of Online Backup Services?
Posted in Tips with tags Backup on May 12, 2012 by itnerdI have to admit that I’m of two minds when it comes to online backup services. Here’s why they appeal to me:
- They are effortless: Typically a piece of software does all the work for you automatically. Thus you don’t need to do a thing to backup your computer.
- The data is safely off site: An ideal scenario is that you backup your data and keep it off site so that a physical disaster (fire, theft, etc.) doesn’t cost you your data.
- You can (for the most part) restore your data from anywhere with an Internet connection: This is one consideration for mobile users who travel often.
Now, here’s why I’m not a fan:
- You have to trust your backup provider will be around when you need them: Some backup providers haven’t been around that long. Others have a much longer track record. In either case, if they go out of business you’re screwed.
- These services are bandwidth intensive: In the age of bandwidth caps, you may blow through your cap quickly using one of these services. Not to mention that you need a lot of bandwidth to use one of these services.
- How do you know that your data will stay private?
- How do you know that your data will not go to some foreign country that may be interested in what you’re storing?
- Is the backup provider compliant to standards like HIPAA for example?
Personally, I am the type that would rather be in control and responsible of my backup requirements. That doesn’t mean that these services are ideal for some users whether they are home users or businesses. My advice is to look at your needs and if online backup is right for you, you should carefully research the provider so that you know that you’re going with someone who is reliable, responsible, and will be around when you need them.
Today Is World Backup Day…. You Backup Don’t You?
Posted in Commentary with tags Backup on March 31, 2011 by itnerdBacking up the stuff on your computer is something everyone should do. Today should give you extra incentive to do so as it’s World Backup Day. If you don’t presently have a back up strategy, you might want to click the link as it will give you all sorts of reasons why you should and discounts to online backup services. If that isn’t enough, I’ll toss in my two articles on the subject as I am a big believer in making sure you have a backup strategy.
How To Back Up Your Mac [UPDATE x2]
Posted in Tips with tags Apple, Backup on May 23, 2008 by itnerdOne of the things that I forgot to mention when I wrote this article is how to backup your Mac. That’s a glaring oversight considering I referenced an iMac in the original article. In any case backing up a Mac is dead easy.
First you need an external hard drive. You can choose from the pre-built solutions from companies like Seagate, or you can buy your own 3.5″ hard drive and external enclosure and build your own for less. Alternately, you can use a network attached storage enclosure like the D Link DNS-323 that I mentioned in the original article.
Next you need a backup program. I highly recommend Carbon Copy Cloner by Bombich Software. This easy to use software will not only make backups on demand, but it will also allow you to schedule backups too. Plus, the backups that you make can be fully bootable (meaning in the event of a disaster, you just plug your backup into your Mac and turn the Mac on), or you can make them into image files (handy if you’re wanting to keep different versions of your backups and/or you want to backup to a network attached storage enclosure). The software is shareware and you can donate whatever you feel the software is worth.
At the moment I am backing up my MacBook Pro using Carbon Copy Cloner to an external hard drive that I built using a 250 GB Seagate Barracuda SATA drive and this external enclosure. I’m basically making a bootable disk every time I back up as I like the security of having a bootable disk at hand. But I will eventually move to backing up to my DNS-323 and saving it as an image when I retire my main PC this summer and make my MacBook Pro my main computer.
In closing, I’ll say what I said in the original article again: The most important thing that you can do if you have a computer is to BACK UP YOUR DATA on a regular basis. Don’t assume that your computer will always work and that you won’t have a problem that will cost you your data. That assumption often ends up being wrong.
P.S. I’ve updated the original backup article as the external hard drive mentioned in that article is no longer available from Seagate.
UPDATE: I’ve changed my backup strategy since I wrote this article. I’ve switched from Carbon Copy Cloner To SuperDuper as my backup application as it easily allows me to create a pair of scripts that will back up my computer to a disk image on my D Link DNS-323 automatically. The scripts are designed to do a full backup of my MacBook Pro every Saturday morning at 12AM, and updates that image every other night of the week. The full backup takes about two hours and the updates takes about 30 minutes to do. SuperDuper is $29.95 USD but you can run it’s basic functions in a trial mode. The scripting functions are only available if you pay for it.
UPDATE #2: I’ve since moved back to Carbon Copy Cloner for a variety of reasons that I explain here.
Backup! Backup! Backup! [UPDATED]
Posted in Tips with tags Backup, PC on February 23, 2008 by itnerdTrue story.
I once worked in a computer repair shop and a guy came in with his iMac saying that his computer wouldn’t boot. I took a quick look at it and discovered that the hard drive had malfunctioned and that was keeping his computer from booting. When I told him this, he then asked “What about the stuff on my drive?” I told him that I could do nothing to recover his data and that unless he went to a data recovery place, he has lost his data. He burst into tears at that point and then told me that he had digital pictures of his mother on that drive and she just passed away in the last couple of weeks. He was desperate to get those pictures back as “that’s all he had left of her.” I disassembled the computer on the spot (something I don’t normally do) and got the drive out and gave it to the customer along with referrals to several data recovery places (which he took advantage of).
The most important thing that you can do if you have a computer is to BACK UP YOUR DATA on a regular basis. Chances are, you have pictures, music, financial records, and all sorts of important data on your computer. What happens if your hard drive has some sort of problem? One of two things usually happens:
- The data is gone forever.
- You have to go to a data recovery service to TRY and get your data back. If they succeed, expect to pay anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars.
To avoid either of these, you should make backups on a regular basis. Here’s how I do it:
- I use Acronis True Image 10 as my backup program. It has the capability of making an exact copy of your hard drive (including the hidden recovery partition that some computers have) and if you make a boot CD, you can use it to do what is called a “bare metal restore” to a blank hard drive. It backs up to CD, DVD external hard drives, or network attached storage drives. The best part is that you can schedule backups and forget about it as it will backup your data on the schedule you set. You may be asking, why am I not using Acronis True Image 11 as that is the latest version. I tried it and found that it had a serious bug. Namely, it didn’t always backup on the schedule that you set. People on the Acronis message board have been talking about it in posts like this, this, and this and nobody seems to be happy. So I will avoid True Image 11 until this is fixed. Seeing as the application has been out since the latter half of last year and there is no fix for this yet, it doesn’t enhance my confidence in Acronis and their ability to fix this issue. It is likely that I will be looking at a new backup program shortly, which is a shame as Acronis True Image is very easy to use. But at the end of the day the program has to work and right now that’s questionable with their latest version.
- I back up to a D-Link DNS-323 Storage Enclosure. Basically this is a enclosure that holds two SATA hard drives (in my case, two 500GB Seagate Barracuda hard drives) and plugs into your network via a 10/100/Gigabit Ethernet connection. You can configure the hard drives to mirror each other for extra security. The unit seems solid and their latest firmware seems to have cleared up any issues the product might have had.
With this setup, all my Windows computers backup via my network every night between midnight and 7AM. Since all of my computers have Gigabit Ethernet ports, it only takes about three hours to backup each Windows computer. The other important thing is that I have tested the restore capabilities. I made a boot CD using Acronis True Image and I was able to do a full restore to a blank hard drive. That’s important as backups mean nothing if you can’t restore it.
Now you don’t have to do what I’ve done to have secure backups. A much easier thing that you can do is to get an external hard drive and use that to backup your computer. My personal favorite are the Seagate Free Agent Pro Drives as all you do is plug it into your Windows computer, install some software and it does the rest for you. Plus Seagate make the best hard drives in the industry and back them with 5 year warranties.
So in closing, I say it again: The most important thing that you can do if you have a computer is to BACK UP YOUR DATA on a regular basis. Don’t assume that your computer will always work and that you won’t have a problem that will cost you your data. After all, you don’t want to end up like the gentleman at the start of this post.
Oh yeah, as for that gentleman and the photos. He did get the photos along with the rest of his data. But it cost him $1500 (Canadian dollars that is). It also cost him $300 to have the computer fixed (I installed a new hard drive and did a restore of the original operating system and applications that came from the factory). He also bought an external hard drive to backup his data so that he would never be on the brink of losing his data again.
P.S. If you’re looking for advice in terms of backing up your Mac, click here.
UPDATE: I should note that Acronis True Image Home 2009 is out, but judging from this post and the fact that PC Magazine recently posted a rather negative review, it doesn’t seem to be stable enough to switch to. That’s a shame because True Image used to be a great backup program. I am still using True Image Home 10 and I have been recommending to my clients that they use this version as it is rock solid. I am currently evaluating several alternatives and I will post my recommedation when I find something that I feel comfortable with. At the moment, I am leaning towards ShadowProtect Desktop as a viable replacement.
The Recovery Continues…..
Posted in Commentary with tags Backup, Mac on July 2, 2014 by itnerdSo far, my recovery from this little mishap with my MacBook Pro is going well. Today I noticed I was without iWeb, iDVD, and iMovie HD. Now, Apple doesn’t officially support any of these apps anymore, but they matter to me for the following reasons:
So the question is what to do about these missing items. Now I could have gone to my trusty backup to get them. But given this is a fresh install of OS X Mavericks, I wanted to make sure I didn’t transfer over any issues, so I did this:
I had to go to this location, copy this file and paste it to the same location on my computer. Hint to Apple: You should put every file that relates to a users data in a place where it can be easily found. This does not qualify as being easy to find.
I’ll keep using it and I think I’ll find little things that I need to address, but it seems to be all good so far.
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