Automated daily backups

Look. I know this isn’t a sexy topic. But an artist Shannon was talking with yesterday had her hard drive with all of her songs on it crash … and she didn’t have a backup … and, wow, this is easily preventable!

Having a second hard drive that you sometimes plug in and manually copy files to is a crap idea. Don’t do this. It’s a pain in the ass, so you will keep putting it off, and it’ll be basically useless. Here are some much better backup strategies:

• A backup drive that can remain permanently plugged in, with software to automate the backups. I use Carbon Copy Cloner (this is Mac-only software). It’s inexpensive and excellent. You tell it what to back up, and where to back it up to, and on what schedule to do that, and then you never think about it again. This strategy works better with a fixed computer than with a mobile computer (i.e., laptop).

• If you are working from a laptop that you sometimes take places, making a permanently-attached hard drive an issue, a good option could be a USB hub. You can leave the backup drive permanently attached to the hub, and plug your laptop onto the hub when it’s in its home location.

• A slightly more expensive option is a network-mounted hard drive, aka NAS device (network-attached storage). Here is a good starter guide in PC Magazine about some NAS devices at various prices and storage levels.

• In both of the above examples you will still need software to automate the backups — Carbon Copy Cloner or similar. DO NOT try to fool yourself into thinking that you will remember to back up your hard drive every night. You will not remember.

• Dropbox! You can literally just install the Dropbox software on your computer and put your work folder inside the Dropbox folder, and then everything you do will be instantaneously backed up to the cloud. This is what I do with my main work folder. I should note that my main work folder also gets backed up nightly to a separate drive, because sometimes it’s valuable to have the snapshot from the previous night, in case I’ve done something stupid and accidentally overwritten something I need, which of course then immediately gets propagated to Dropbox. I restore something from the nightly backup at least once a month, and it’s a lifesaver.
  
  (For this reason, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend using Dropbox as your only backup solution, because if you accidentally delete something from your work folder, it will also be immediately deleted from Dropbox. Dropbox does have a “historical revisions” feature, but in my experience it’s a little weird, and I wouldn’t want to have to rely on it. Still, between no automated backups and Dropbox-only backups, I would definitely choose Dropbox!)

Between the above options, you should be able to find something that works well for you. The important thing is that you have something in place for automated daily backups; if you don’t, you are guaranteed to lose something critically important at the worst possible time — and that could be devastating.

Mayday — jamie