Posts Tagged with “Carbon Copy Cloner”

My backup plan: David Wang

The editors at MacWorld.com have been detailing their backup strategies (Dan Frakes, Lex Friedman). I thought I would add mine as well.

Since I replaced my internal drive (Macintosh HD) with a 240GB SSD, I’ve off-loaded some of my data to an Auxiliary drive. My whole life and business live on these 2 drives. This makes me very nervous that something bad will happen to them, so I have implemented a rigorous, redundant, yet automatic backup strategy.

1. My internal drive is backed up hourly to a Time Machine volume on my network storage.

2. Both the internal and Auxiliary drive are cloned every night to an external drive connected via USB. This happens automatically thanks to Carbon Copy Cloner. CCC is free to use but I have gladly given the developer Mike Bombich a donation for his excellent software.

3. Finally, both the drives are backed up to the BackBlaze online backup service. BackBlaze backs up unlimited data and any connected drives for a low $5 per month.

With my system, there are at least 3 copies of all my data at any given time, in 2 separate locations (local and online). Time Machine and BackBlaze will allow me to restore lost files, and the nightly clones will allow me to boot up from a snapshot that’s less than 24 hours old.

Backing up is important. Don’t wait till it’s too late and you’ve lost your work files, family photos, etc. It’s bound to happen sooner or later, so please get around to it today. If you think that I’m paranoid for being redundant, that’s because I’ve had my backup drive die on me before. It doesn’t hurt to be paranoid, especially when storage is cheap and backup options are plenty. Download Carbon Copy Cloner and sign up for BackBlaze today.

Update: I now also regularly swap the clones with another drive every few weeks. I store the swapped drive at my in-laws house, so that’s another offsite backup in my strategy.