Backing up Time Machine

Posted:
in macOS edited January 2014
After years of feeling guilty because of my sloppy, often non-existent, approach to doing backups at home and at work I am loving Time Machine. I no longer have to worry about a hard drive crashing and one of my kids freaking out because the only copy of their homework was on it. It does, however, bother me that Time Machine backups exist on another hard drive which could fail as easily as an internal hard drive. So, has anyone come up with a mechanism for backing up the backups? I'm considering using s3sync to Amazon's S3 service but my Backups.backupdb directory is 87Gb so that would take a day and an age.



Anyone got a better idea?



... WkH

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 7
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by wkharold View Post


    After years of feeling guilty because of my sloppy, often non-existent, approach to doing backups at home and at work I am loving Time Machine. I no longer have to worry about a hard drive crashing and one of my kids freaking out because the only copy of their homework was on it. It does, however, bother me that Time Machine backups exist on another hard drive which could fail as easily as an internal hard drive. So, has anyone come up with a mechanism for backing up the backups? I'm considering using s3sync to Amazon's S3 service but my Backups.backupdb directory is 87Gb so that would take a day and an age.



    Anyone got a better idea?



    ... WkH



    Use SuperDuper! or CCC to clone it to another Volume of equal or large size. Do this say per week as a secondary backup. I plan to do this but will require the investment in another disk Volume.
  • Reply 2 of 7
    I've used Mozy on quite a few Macs. It does take forever to upload a huge amount of data, but the program does a real good job at working in the background and between certain times if you want it to. Once I had it installed, I kind of just forgot about it and then a few weeks later I looked and everything had been upped.
  • Reply 3 of 7
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by wkharold View Post


    After years of feeling guilty because of my sloppy, often non-existent, approach to doing backups at home and at work I am loving Time Machine. I no longer have to worry about a hard drive crashing and one of my kids freaking out because the only copy of their homework was on it. It does, however, bother me that Time Machine backups exist on another hard drive which could fail as easily as an internal hard drive. So, has anyone come up with a mechanism for backing up the backups? I'm considering using s3sync to Amazon's S3 service but my Backups.backupdb directory is 87Gb so that would take a day and an age.



    Anyone got a better idea?



    ... WkH



    Do I understand correctly that you want 3 copies of the same data? Are you worried that 2 drives might fail at the same time? Yes, an external hard drive could fail but chances are low that it would happen simultaneously with the internal drive. If the external fails, get a new one and plug it into your computer and activate time machine and you are safe again.
  • Reply 4 of 7
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Daffy_Duck View Post


    Do I understand correctly that you want 3 copies of the same data? Are you worried that 2 drives might fail at the same time? Yes, an external hard drive could fail but chances are low that it would happen simultaneously with the internal drive. If the external fails, get a new one and plug it into your computer and activate time machine and you are safe again.



    For myself, 3 copies (not necessarily of my whole computer) are needed, sometimes more. Main drive goes out... go to the external drive (which I can move to another machine if necessary). Then I have a backup on my Airport Extreme so that other computers can share it, and if the computer with the external hard drive gets a power surge or something freaky and fries the external along with it (happened to me, right through a high-end surge protector and battery backup unit). Finally, off-site in case of a fire at the house, or theft, or most importantly a meteor hit. If I lose my data, I lose my job. All my scripts, pitches, novels, etc. Gone. No way. I have scripts dating back twenty five years, gotten from 3.5" floppies, transfered to 1.44" floppies, to hard drives, CD's, DVD's and now back to hard drives. I'm not losin' nuthin'.
  • Reply 5 of 7
    timotimo Posts: 353member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Daffy_Duck View Post


    Do I understand correctly that you want 3 copies of the same data? Are you worried that 2 drives might fail at the same time? Yes, an external hard drive could fail but chances are low that it would happen simultaneously with the internal drive. If the external fails, get a new one and plug it into your computer and activate time machine and you are safe again.



    fire?
  • Reply 6 of 7
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Daffy_Duck View Post


    Do I understand correctly that you want 3 copies of the same data? Are you worried that 2 drives might fail at the same time? Yes, an external hard drive could fail but chances are low that it would happen simultaneously with the internal drive. If the external fails, get a new one and plug it into your computer and activate time machine and you are safe again.



    Now that the day-to-day backup problem is handled I'm concerned about the catastrophic possibilities, e.g., lightening strike (yes, I have surge protectors but they may or may not handled a direct strike) or fire. Ergo, it would be nice to have an off-site copy of my data. Granted, a full backup of the OS is probably unnecessary so maybe I'll just continue backing up critical stuff to Amazon S3 via s3sync.



    ... WkH
  • Reply 7 of 7
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by wkharold View Post


    Now that the day-to-day backup problem is handled I'm concerned about the catastrophic possibilities, e.g., lightening strike (yes, I have surge protectors but they may or may not handled a direct strike) or fire. Ergo, it would be nice to have an off-site copy of my data. Granted, a full backup of the OS is probably unnecessary so maybe I'll just continue backing up critical stuff to Amazon S3 via s3sync.



    ... WkH



    It might be more cost effective to back up to DVDs for offsite storage.
Sign In or Register to comment.