Backups are no longer optional

“It’s time we had a little talk.  It’s about something uncomfortable, but we can’t keep pretending that you don’t have a problem.  I don’t know how to say this, and I’m kind of embarrassed, so I’m just going to come out and say it.  How recent is your latest backup?”

Of course, I jest, but in many cases, and with a goodly amount of people we work with, this very sort of intervention is needed.

Ask yourself the following questions: How well do you trust your backup solution?  How often do you use your backup software?  Do you verify your backups?

As Pausha pointed out to me earlier today, my most amusing occupational war stories all involve backups (or the lack of them.)  It’s no laughing matter to lose all of your important data, or even worse, to lose a client’s important data, which opens you up to all manner of professional difficulty, including possible liability.  Traditionally, the burned hand teaches best, and I’ve found this old adage to be absolutely true.  Hopefully, you can take some wisdom from this article, and learn from someone else’s burned hands.

For the sake of simplicity, I’m going to divide this article into two portions.  The first will cover your basic home backup needs, and the second will address the more specific needs of creative professionals, such as musicians, videographers, editors, photographers, designers, etc.

First, a story; no, a confession.  In 2005, we were moving Pausha (web designer) from her obsolete G4 Lampshade iMac (I still miss that design!) to a newer G5 tower.  Unfortunately for us at the time, we were still backing up onto CDs.  I backed up all of her project data, and then wiped her iMac’s hard drive to prepare it for sale to a friend.  
I discovered the next day while preparing her user account on her new computer, that many (um… almost all) of the files on the backup CDs were not copied correctly.  That’s right, I lost most of her project files, and her personal design work files.  Our most recent prior backup was a month or two old, and we were able to recover a small amount of her data, but all of the projects she was currently working on were gone.  The obvious result is that she had to build 2 websites back up from scratch, and redesign a few complicated images which had already been approved.  My carelessness caused her more than a full 40-hour’s labor, and frankly, compared to what we’ve seen in the past few years with other clients, she got off easy!

I learned two extremely valuable lessons from this experience, not counting the amazing quality of forgiveness exhibited by my wife.  The first lesson was to verify my backups instead of simply assuming that I am, in fact safe.  The second lesson was to create a backup solution that was solid, reliable, and easy for Pausha to execute on her own.

The simple truth for most people is that unless their backup process is very easy, they cannot be counted upon to do it with regularity.



Consumers take note.
With OSX 10.5 Leopard, Apple has delivered Time Machine, which is a robust and automated backup software which leaves us with very little in the way of excuses.  If you’ve got an older version of OSX installed, and do not have Time Machine, there are many good backup programs available for you, but none of them offer Time Machine’s ease of use.  With Time Machine, once configured, all you have to do is take a look its logo in the menu bar, and watch for error messages.  What’s even more important is that Time Machine makes it easier than ever to recover lost files than any other backup program I have ever used.  What’s the point of running daily backups if you have to battle to recover files in the event you need to?

We can talk about hard drive manufacturers until the cows come home.  There are many brands of external hard drives out there, and I’ve used many of them, and I’ve experienced mechanical failure with several of them.  I have had the best luck with LaCie drives, and I work regularly with video professionals who swear by LaCie drives and will use no other brands.  To be absolutely clear, I have also had my share of LaCie drives die on me, but in my own experience, LaCie offers excellent products with the lowest fail-rate I’ve seen.

What to buy?  What size drive?
It really depends on how you use your computer.  Do you have a desktop Mac, or do you use a portable MacBook or MacBook Pro?  How big is the internal hard drive of your computer?

You’ll want to get a drive that has at least 1.5 times the capacity of your computer’s drive.  If you have an iMac with a 200GB hard drive in it, get a 300GB backup drive.  Or get a 500GB backup drive if you think you may outgrow your computer’s internal drive in the near future.

I recommend the following three drives for most people.
Here’s one for MacBook owners, the LaCie Little Disk.  Check it out HERE.



MacBook Pro owners might consider this, LaCie Rugged Drive.  Check it out HERE.



For Desktops I’d recommend this drive.  LaCie D2 Quadra.  Check it out HERE.



I’m actually using this for my MacBook Pro, but it’s mostly because my MBP lives on a stand on my desk, and it’s really easy for me to remember to plug in.  I used to backup to a portable drive, but I would forget to pull the portable drive out of my bag and plug it in.

(oh, by the way, these drives only work if you plug them in to your computer regularly.  I actually had someone tell me that they didn’t realize that.  No, your data will not backup through the computer’s mitochondrial cell walls, you actually have to participate a little bit.)

Time Machine will run a backup for you every hour as long as your drive is plugged in and mounted.  If you don’t have your drive plugged in all the time, as I do, you should attach the drive and let Time Machine do its thing at least once a day.

That’s it.  For anyone who’s running an older version of OSX, give me a call, or email and we can talk about what backup software options are available to you.


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For the Pros
Creative professionals have a larger backup burden, especially folks in the video world.  First, creative professionals need to be backing up their own application and user data just as the normal home user does, but we’re also responsible for client footage and data, as well as our own creative work.

For anyone who shoots and edits a lot of video or does a lot of audio recording, and has not heard me rant about this before:  you should NEVER write video or audio (in quantity) to your internal system hard drive.  Ever.  Doing so will cause your system hard drive to fragment faster than anything else in the world.  And if you lose your system drive from fragmentation, not only are you out of the game until you can have it repaired, you also run the risk of losing that important data.

Creative Professionals should work to a drive other than our system drives.  If you have a tower, you should have a separate designated work drive installed.  If you’re using an iMac or a portable, you should be working directly onto an external drive.  And NOT the drive you’ve got your system backup on.  Duh.  The whole point of this entire exercise is redundancy.

Here’s another story for you.  I worked with a videographer last week who has a G5 Tower with a separate work drive which contained all of his client’s video footage on it.  He recently came home to discover that his computer had been hit with a huge power surge (I’ll write about surge protectors later) and both of his internal hard drives had failed.  NO backup.  He has an external backup drive, but he hadn’t plugged it in and run a backup in months.  What to do?  Since his computer was miraculously not destroyed, we put 2 new hard drives in, installed the system and all of his applications, and sent him home with essentially a brand-new computer.  But all of that lost footage?   Gone.  Forever.  I don’t want to be on the phone when the clients find out.

I do video.  I do audio.  I do photography.  Here’s what I use.

• My Backup drive.  This backs up my system, my applications, music, home movies, photos.

• My Project Drive is a 2TB LaCie Raid disk.  This drive contains two 1TB  hard drives.  I write my projects to one of the 1TB drives, and then it automatically backs itself up onto its other 1TB drive.  If I find myself needing more than the 1TB, I can simply purchase a couple of raw drives with larger capacity and replace them.  The cost of blank drives has gone so low that backing up huge volumes is no longer cost prohibitive.  Check this drive out HERE.  If you’re working with a lot of audio, video, or photographs, you should seriously consider getting one for yourself.

Both drives are plugged into my MacBook Pro almost all of the time, except for when I take my MBP to meetings or retire to the patio with it.  I obviously don’t drag these external drives with me to the couch.  When I return my computer to my desk, I plug the drives back in, and the backups begin.  I almost don’t have to think about it anymore, and when I accidentally throw away a video clip, or delete a Mail folder I can quickly recover it, and lose only the 90 seconds or so that it takes for Time Machine to restore that file.

Bottom Line
It’s all going digital.  Video cameras are currently the best-selling consumer electronic on the market.  We’re putting more photos and home movies on our computer than ever before.  We’re downloading Gigabytes of music from the internet.  We’re digitizing our paper records, using Quicken to manage our finances.  It’s time to give serious consideration to your backup routine.  The burnt hand is the best teacher, but there are some things I’m willing to let others learn the hard way.

If you’ve got any questions or comments, please feel free to leave them in the comments section of this post.

Thanks for reading!

Tagged as: Apple, Mac