I revived this as a general topic

TimeMachine
CCC
off premises

successes failures, tips and tricks
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original post
http://www.macintouch.com/mail.app10.html

Another reason to not only insist on backup but we suggest an optical archive from time to time of the Mail folder as this kind of partial damage is insidious and would end up on the autobackup as well.

I had a similar issue when I created a new mailbox - something went wrong when I "moved" the threads to the new mailbox. They disappeared. Luckily it was unneeded stuff ( macmagic notifications from the tech forum ) but it COULD have been critical stuff.

I just archived to DVD and I'm going to keep a copy out of the premises as a long time security. With data now going back almost 20 years - keeping a copy of critical files off premises makes sense.
That goes for precious photos and any original work you do.

With DVDs so inexpensive - taking the backup to the next archival step makes a lot of sense. Yo never know whan a tsunami might wash away your data.........
One client's laptop is on the bottom of the ocean - she's safe and hopefully backed up.
Likely $2 a month gives you off premises security. Bank box, a copy at home if at work or vice versus - time is AGAINST you as risks rise with the amount of data you have.

If you have a lot of data then a transportable drive off premises makes the most sense. Cheap insurance in the long term. Make it a New Year's resolution....get a comprehensive backup strategy IN PLACE

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Also on a related note when I switched to 10.3.7 I lost psynch as part of CCC - did not notice for almost 2 weeks !!!!!!
no backup going on.
Check from time to time by opening CCC and seeing that the schedule is still there and have the application pop the log up on completion of the task so you have a visual alert.

Comments and discussion on back up and applications highly encouraged.

MacDoc, do you have any backup tips for us?
I'm looking a 1TB at home, how would you go about backing that stuff up?

Hello MacDoc,

As always, good advice.

I'm looking into a 160GB external hard drive to backup my personal and work files as well as my wife's eMac. Any recommendations or stuff to avoid? I know a firewire drive would be a lot faster than doing it via USB and its whopping 12 Mb/sec!

I especially need this before June when I should be allowed to connect my iBook up to the local network. I'm sure they'll want me to get a virus checker so I don't spread viruses to their network. "Virus checker? What the hell is a virus checker?"

It will also be nice so I don't have to give my employer direct access to my work files. Currently, it appears that anything I make for work becomes the property of my employer even though I have created it using my own knowledge, skills, and abilities. "Intellectual property? What the hell is that?"

Since I currently use the office PC for some of my work, that means I am using their property, which makes it a lot easier for them to get their files. It would be even easier if I used their server, but I don't want to make it too easy.

James

Hi, my name is Chris. I work with MacDoc. After David told me about his own mailbox trouble, I developed a custom "rolling" archive technique that is easy to set up. PM me for details.

ArtistSeries:

Backup is crucial in your case, and the more data you have in one place, the more valuable an offsite backup is! How is this TB distributed? Multiple computers or just one? What kind of data is it and does ALL of it need to be backed up? This will determine what kind of solution you end up with.

If it's video footage, do you have the original tapes and are they logged? If it's photos, is the original film/CD a sufficient backup? Today I am recovering a portfolio drive for a client who has copies of his work on CD anyway. But it's the literally 100's of hours of retouching that he's lost. How much is that worth? A lot, but he didn't invest in a backup!

With this much data, you should only back up unique work. Applications and systems can be re-installed.

If you have multiple computers, you might want a Retrospect server. Depending on the speed required (you can have your systems back up at night) using this with a dedicated tape backup would be the best option. It's more reliable than anything else, something that becomes crucial when you have a lot of data. A faulty backup medium turns a bad situation into a catastrophe!

We can develop the right solution for you. Let me know if you have any more questions or additional info about your setup.

james_squared:

If it's your work on your time, keep it safe in your own hands! I'm not a lawyer, of course, I'm just a computer guy. I have seen some discussion of this on Slashdot .

I suggest you partition the backup drive (Firewire is a must, don't bother with USB) if you're going to share it. One partition for you and one for your wife. Automatic backups will be hard though, so you may want a couple of drives, one for each system. You could leave a single drive connected to the eMac, have it backup a complete system and sync automatically. Then connect your laptop as needed and do the backup manually.

As well, make occasional CD or DVD backups of your mail and anything else you might want to store in another location.

Is there a program that will recognize what is already backed up and then write the new info to the back up drive. I have hundreds of photos with variations and trying to figure out what I've already backed up is sometimes mind boggling. I'd love to be able and just hit a button at the end of the day and have the program back it up to my external drive.

Another question is: do external drives need any maintenance in terms of permissions or anything else?

Hey Dave, do you have any insight into the stability of Mail? My crew are all using entourage, and I'm starting to spend too much time trying to recover mail for people whose dbase has topped the 2gig mark. I decided to make the switch to Mail and am quite impressed. Am I just opening another can of worms or is there another solution? Even with backups in place, you usually lose a day or more worth of emails and those are usually the most important. BTW, what files will I need to backup for Mail and where will I find them?

Hey, folks.

I can attest to the fact I have 100% success using Apple's Backup. I back up any necessary files to a LaCie external FW drive with nothing else on it. Backup is thorough and overwrites edited data as well as adding anything new. I've had a few occasions to restore from the back up file and all went without a hitch. The last restore I performed was just last week - over 30 GB of data was successfully restored, including all mail, music and photos within Apple's apps.

I still make a habit of writing critical data to CD or DVD. Apple's Backup performs just as well using this method.

Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) has been used for a long time by Mac OS X users and it gets high marks for backing up a complete, bootable system. Install psync with it (can be done through CCC preferences) and it will synchronize only new files or files that have changed since the last backup. CCC can also repair permissions on the SOURCE volume before each backup, ensuring that no problems creep into the backup. Do this with Apple's Disk Utility the first time, and let CCC and psync copy over the changes.

http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html

For synchronizing individual folders, rather than an entire disk, use PsyncX:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=59994

Apple's Backup is good, but it won't backup a bootable system – and you have to subscribe to .Mac to use it. For non-system files, copying manually is sufficient and even preferable since you know exactly what you're backing up and that it worked as you intended.

Andreww – the link posted at the top of this thread has many reports of issues with Mail. I would avoid letting any single mailbox grow to more than one gigabyte. If you already have a mailbox approaching or past this size, split the messages accross two or more mailboxes.

These mailbox files are stored separately for each Mac OS X user. You can find them at /Users/shortusername/Library/Mail. If you don't want to lose a day or more worth of email, set Mail to delete messages on the server AFTER the number of days between backups. Mail -> Preferences -> Accounts -> Advanced.

Andrew you need to bail on Entourage - it's horribly dangerous.

Mail is much more robust.
It still has a much stronger file structure - each mail item is a separate entity. Where it seems a bit weak is in the folder structure when you move things around.

We recommend a archive backup just to cover off some the folder weakness and Mail 2.0 looks even stronger.

You can drop a folder from a backup into Mail and it's there - you can go in a delete an individual corrupt file from outside the program
That a tremendous benefit over the really ugly "all in one file" that Entourage represents.

You're clearly in the danger zone - time to bail to Mail

psyncx (not to be confused with psync) is also very good. a much more intelligent interface than CCC, imo. allows you to choose individual files and folders for backup (they don't have to be at the root of the source drive as in CCC) which is useful for scheduling incremental backups of email among other things.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/psyncx

ps., someone please correct me if CCC has gained the ability to clone from a folder not on the root of the source HD.

Do these apps (CCC Psync) run in the backgound when they are schedualed, or do I have to start them/add to my start-up items?

In the backround entirely. I have the log pop up just to let me know the are working otherwise I could not tell.

Holy cow...

I'm in the dark here. Is there a page with instructions? I let this go overnight and it didn't update my image.

Should it be an image?

I'm lost.

You have the settings wrong - not an image - just a bootable volume set to synchronize.

Once had a guy come in the shop nearly peeing his pants because he "had" to have files on his hard drive . I turn the iMac on and the harddrive goes -grind -grind -gring -clunk
so I ask him about it and he says it has been making that noise for two months . So I asked him if he has backed any thing up , he says "uh no " , No way for me to save it so I remove the Drive give it to him and tell him to try a Data-Rescue place , he pays for a new hard drive and gives me a bag with his software in it for me to reload on the machine and in the bag there is a service request from another store dated about a year before with the Note that the "client " needs important files on hard drive . WHAT AN IDIOT , Some people never learn .
Do your Back ups / make a plan / If you are super cheap then make a Gmail account or Yahoo mail and e-mail the thing to yourself if you have to , but everyone should have some plan

Break it down to 1/ long term storage , stuff that you cant replace also make images of your software so if you scratch a cd or break one as I have done , it is not the end of the world . double it and move one off site . To guard against fire thief and flood at either site

Make your mid term back ups to CD /DVD like every two weeks or month depending on how much new information or your information changes and the best if you can afford it is to have a second machine to make in to a server to make back-ups to how ever often you feel you need to ,

and I am not one to talk my back up is a dog's lunch of external had drives / server and old jaz drive cassettes

A new gun in town??



http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/22126

http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html

Sure getting hot reviews. We had a couple of stupid CCC events with drives that had little maintenance.

We might put this in our arsenal ...........

Feedback desired

SuperDuper is hands down the BEST app I've used for this purpose yet. i highly reccomend it, I just did imaging and re-deploying of almost 100 machines with it and it is fantastic. Well worth the (tiny) price to register it as the features it opens are incredible. Fully scriptable and very reliable.

The safety backups alone are worth the registration fee + more, let alone all the choices within the scripts. This is an essential piece of my mac toolkit.

I moved from CCC a while back to this one, as I was starting to have some issues with CCC and reliability. Can't expect too much for free and Mike Bombich is a busy guy so he hasn't done any CCC updates in a while

I just backed up all my files, prefs, etc to a Lacie external drive using Backup. I installed Tiger and tried to restore from Backup. Total pain in the arse and I lost all my old mail messages and I had to maually save most of what I backed up and then install it all in the proper order piece by piece. I got my images in iPhoto back but none of the albums so I have to sort through about a 1000 images and reorganize. I won't trust backup the next time I do a system reinstall.

G

Bummer, Gary. Were you restoring from a Panther back up to a new Tiger install? I haven't tried that yet. I elected to perform the "Archive & Install" option when moving to Tiger and all went (surprisingly) well.

Yep. It was a clean install to tiger from Panther. Very disappointing results on the Backup front.
Old email is just a burden anyway.

G

I've just found out that Backup sucks.

I had turned on FileVault, and the image became corrupted somehow. I lost ALL my settings and personal data, including my old e-mail that I needed for work purposes.

Apple was no help at all on this issue.

So I reformatted and thought I could recover my files using Backup.

Wrong.

Backup is refusing to do what it is billed to do. I've had to make a copy of my log files and to send them to Apple along with the last incremental backup file so that Apple can "attempt to help me" with this problem.

I've been backing up daily to a second HD, thinking I was covered.

Anyone recommend a decent back up programme?

I use and recommend "SuperDuper". It is well supported, inexpensive and lets you make a bootable backup (i.e. if your main HD fails you can actually boot from backup and keep working)

I like using SuperDuper for backup software that lets me make a bootable clone and I also like using more than one backup HD that sits offsite and rotate them.