Image by Malabooboo at Flickr via Wikipedia
Click-whirrrrrrr. Click-whirrrrrrr.. These were incredibly ominous sounds coming from the hard drive for my iMac the other day. Hard drives should not click. Clicking noises from hard drives usually portend very bad things. And indeed, it was not pretty. Upshot: hard drive dead, data not recoverable, brand new hard drive (doubled capacity, so that's something) installed under warranty. The kicker? "Create and implement whole-house backup strategy" has been on my household ToDo list for, literally, years.
It got me thinking that freelancers, early-stage entrepreneurs, frequent telecommuters, and work-at-home parents pay yet another cost for their independence and flexibility: no built-in IT support and thus, no built-in backups.
Sure, more and more services (such as email, document sharing, blogging, photo-sharing, and so on) live in the cloud. But we all still keep important data on local hard drives. And hard drives fail. If it hasn't happened to you yet, it will. So creating and maintaining a reliable backup strategy for your data and computer systems is an important piece of work-life management.
The day after my hard drive failed I decided to break out of ye olde analysis paralysis and ordered a Time Capsule from Apple (refurbished, 1 Terabyte). Both my iMac and MacBook are now regularly backing themselves up to it. We also ordered a couple of big external drives that we’ll use store bootable images of the Macs on. I haven't implemented that part yet, but will almost certainly use SuperDuper to do it.
That only leaves my PC, which I’ve been aiming to retire soon, anyway, in favor of a virtual machine on the iMac. Related to that, though, I’m not having Time Machine backup the virtual machines on my Macbook or iMac – I may just copy those over manually every month or so and call it good. I don’t store much data on those things – they’re primarily used for work and at work I'm using a VPN and network drive. I am reading that the mean time between failures of the Time Capsules may not be that great, which is a concern. But what we’ve got now is better than what we had two weeks ago, so there's progress.
The last remaining challenge is offsite backups. If the house burns down, how do I get my data back? Awhile ago I created (and pay for) a JungleDisk account. I never got anything automated set up, though. Something about the desktop client just didn't work for me. But it's been improved and it made sense to me this time. So I have dumped some critical data onto that and am thinking about which things I want to schedule to backup into the cloud on JungleDisk regularly. With that, I pay for uploads, downloads, and storage-quite good rates, I think, but it still requires a little bit of thinking.
So, that's been my technology saga this week. (Parts of this post were adapted from an earlier post on my personal blog about it all.) Given that I didn't lose anything terribly vital (through sheer dumb luck - explained over at the personal blog), and given that Macs are pleasurable to work with, rebuilding my iMac has actually been enjoyable. It feels like a new computer and I finally, finally, have gotten serious about automated backup solutions.
But that Click-whirrrrrrr.... I still really hate that sound.
The day after my hard drive failed I decided to break out of ye olde analysis paralysis and ordered a Time Capsule from Apple (refurbished, 1 Terabyte). Both my iMac and MacBook are now regularly backing themselves up to it. We also ordered a couple of big external drives that we’ll use store bootable images of the Macs on. I haven't implemented that part yet, but will almost certainly use SuperDuper to do it.
That only leaves my PC, which I’ve been aiming to retire soon, anyway, in favor of a virtual machine on the iMac. Related to that, though, I’m not having Time Machine backup the virtual machines on my Macbook or iMac – I may just copy those over manually every month or so and call it good. I don’t store much data on those things – they’re primarily used for work and at work I'm using a VPN and network drive. I am reading that the mean time between failures of the Time Capsules may not be that great, which is a concern. But what we’ve got now is better than what we had two weeks ago, so there's progress.
The last remaining challenge is offsite backups. If the house burns down, how do I get my data back? Awhile ago I created (and pay for) a JungleDisk account. I never got anything automated set up, though. Something about the desktop client just didn't work for me. But it's been improved and it made sense to me this time. So I have dumped some critical data onto that and am thinking about which things I want to schedule to backup into the cloud on JungleDisk regularly. With that, I pay for uploads, downloads, and storage-quite good rates, I think, but it still requires a little bit of thinking.
So, that's been my technology saga this week. (Parts of this post were adapted from an earlier post on my personal blog about it all.) Given that I didn't lose anything terribly vital (through sheer dumb luck - explained over at the personal blog), and given that Macs are pleasurable to work with, rebuilding my iMac has actually been enjoyable. It feels like a new computer and I finally, finally, have gotten serious about automated backup solutions.
But that Click-whirrrrrrr.... I still really hate that sound.
Lyn, my husband finally convinced me that I needed to back up my two year old computer, which holds my entire life, including all my work files and all my personal writing. I am grateful indeed, and can relate to your click ... whirr aversion.
Posted by: Karen Paul-Stern | Thursday, October 08, 2009 at 12:33 PM
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Posted by: Andy | Monday, October 12, 2009 at 02:15 PM