Please, backup your computers!
Posted by Doug Wed, 26 Jul 2006 13:06:14 GMT
I’m amazed when I hear things like this: spill a drink, loose your computer, code not checked into a repository, no backup. I don’t mean to pick on this one guy. It feels like I hear of this about once a month. How long have we known about hard disk failures? How many times have you heard you should back up your data? How many of you do?
For more than 90% of us (Mac users—there must be a good solution for others as well) the solution is simple: buy an external disk and SuperDuper!. The first backup is somewhat painful, but after that it only takes about 10 – 15 minutes. You can even schedule it to happen while you’re not using your computer.
The combined price of the drive and software is less than $125. That’s a pretty cheap insurance policy for when disaster strikes. Nightly backups are great for peace of mind.
Oh, another piece of advice: don’t leave code on your computer not committed to your source control. If you think it’s going to take a while to get done, branch your code but still check it in often.
The thing you inferred but didn’t outright mention about SuperDuper! is that it’s not simply a “backup your data” solution. With an external hard drive, you have enough space to mirror your entire drive. And SD! will make it bootable.
I had an experience where I knew my hard drive was on the fritz. I shut all applications and services down, ran an incremental SD!, replaced the drive, ran SD! from the external to the new internal, reboot. Complete hard drive replacement and recovery in less than 30 minutes.
But only because I was prepared.
I’m using CCC for backup of my laptop system disk. But a few weeks ago I dropped one of my external firewire disks, and I bought another Mac for my girlfriend, so now I’m using external USB harddisks, and plain and simple rsync from the command line (rsync -av source destination). And I tried it, too. The backup is not bootable but the data is there, and making backups is very fast. rsync rulez! :)