Paranoid
Guan is paranoid, but it’s probably a good list to consider. My own strategy is much simpler and involves both a trade-off in terms of immediacy and restorability:
- I’m running Backblaze to do an almost full back-up. It doesn’t include my VMware machines or my system files so I won’t be able to restore immediately — as Guan would from his SuperDuper! drive once he’s opened his safe deposit box. This means that I keep no data on my virtual machine that I actually couldn’t live without.
- I’m using Dropbox for all my actual documents — including symlinking in my Desktop and other system folders I use frequently. And an encrypted Notational Velocity notebook of my every thought and secret. This means that I can install a clean OS X and have access to 95% of my documents just by installing Dropbox.
The major upside in this much simpler approach is that everything happens automatically, and there are very few moving parts. In fact, I’m relying only on two excellent and stable services. I’m always backed up at least to within 24 hours of my machine crashing, which is frankly better than I’d manage if I relied on myself remembering to connect physical devices to my computer.
The major downside is that I don’t have either a full backup or an offline backup. If my machine crashes, I can restore everything I care about — but it will probably take about 10 hours of hard work. When it happened last in late 2009, this was the approach:
- Get a new machine.
- Power up a clean Mac OS X and install all the software I needed.
- Start up Dropbox which within about two hours managed to restore most of my documents. With 20 minutes of linking, I had my Desktop and other bits and pieces in working order.
- Identify the last 5% of files. Most of these files, I was able to restore from my previous machine’s hard drive, although this might not be an option if the computer is stolen.
- Retrieve the last missing pieces from Backblaze. This was in fact the hardest part. Backblaze is amazing for backing up, but a bitch to work with for restoring: I spend a few days generating and downloading zip files with music, podcasts, audiobooks and other lost bit and bytes.
