Hey — so I just saw…

Hey -- so I just saw that poor Tim has had a crash as well, and lost editing stuff. It sucks, being an editor and losing info on your authors -- really disconcerting.

So I thought I'd tell y'all what we're using for back-up now. Kevin bought us a OWC Neptune hard drive (which comes with the Retrospect backup program). I asked him last night how much it cost, and he didn't quite remember, but thinks it was about only a dollar/gig, so he went ahead and bought a biggish one -- $250 for 250 G. Which should last us a good long time, since he has an 80 G hard drive, and my little baby is only a 20 G. It took a few hours to make the first full backup (which he handled and I utterly ignored), but last night he showed me how to do nightly backups on my own. Plug in firewire cable, turn on machine, tell Retrospect to run, click Backup. Don't eject/shut down while backup is running. That's it -- pretty straightforward. The backup took about ten minutes, but since it's all automated (it's only backing up the files that changed, which is mighty clever of it, I have to say), I can just walk away and come back when it's over.

I don't honestly expect that I'll back up every single night, but I think I can get onto a weekly schedule without too much hardship. And the plan is in the next few days to make a second full backup, and then alternate between them, so that if one gets messed up somehow, I still have a week-old one that's good.

I'm not entirely sure where Kev bought this hard drive (actually, I have no idea, other than it was someplace online) but if anyone's interested, let me know and I'll ask.

2 thoughts on “Hey — so I just saw…”

  1. I know you’ve already sorted this out, but as you said elsewhere, this might still be useful to others :

    http://www.connected.com

    Online incremental backups, optimised to only send files not already held at the server. (So operating system and application files are probably already there, so they’re not backed up in terms of being copied, your database just gets an entry saying “I’ve got one of them too!”.)

    I liked it because it’s useful for me on business travel and at client sites – my backups don’t depend on any hardware or being at any location.

    Their home/small business plans are fairly economical.

    This isn’t the best solution for someone backing up a desktop that always stays in the same place, but it’s great for laptops.

  2. With some backup software (including Retrospect), you can schedule backups so that it’ll do them automatically at certain times of day or of week or whatever.

    That’s tougher for a laptop—you have to make sure the laptop is plugged into whatever’s handling the backup at the appointed time—but it might not be a bad idea anyway. I’m not sure what Retrospect does if it’s time for a scheduled backup and the relevant media isn’t plugged in; I suspect it puts up a dialog box asking for the media, at which point you just plug in the connection.

    I plan to set this up on my system at home when I get back from traveling next week. (I did a full backup yesterday.)

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