Into the Wild Spaces

Lesson One: Off Site

I learned from a like-minded colleague who taught me a lot about computing in the modern age that the only safe back up is a complete duplication of all valuable material stored in an offsite location. This was an engineer friend, whose office stored a complete set of weekly backup tapes in another facility twenty miles down the road. Think about where you would be if a fire ravaged your home and your diligently-created backups happened to be stored in the desk drawer underneath your computer: you would lose both primary and secondary copies, which is to say you would lose everything. So lesson one is to not only get in the habit of backing up your material but in storing your backups elsewhere. Back up your home computer to a disk you keep at the office and your office backup on a disk you keep at home. Mail a CD to a family member or keep one in your bank safe deposit box, if you have one. Be creative.

The same goes for travelers: put your computer in one bag and the backups in your carry on, or vice versa. If your luggage gets lost you won't lose everything, but if your backups are in your laptop bag you'll lose everything. Keep them separate.

Lesson Two: Regular

Back up regularly. The old adage no one ever pays any attention is: back up no less frequently than the amount of work you would like to avoid duplicating. If you make your living from the written word and can't afford to lose the chapter of the novel you wrote yesterday, your backups should be daily, preferably at the end of a day's writing session. If you keep your email elsewhere (a Gmail account, an IMAP host, or similar) and you only download the occasional family picture, you can probably afford to do a backup once a month. Only you know how much you can afford to lose. Base your backup strategy on that self evaluation and base your plan on that frequency of repetition.

Lesson Three: Automate

Hardly anyone has the foresight, will power, and diligence to backup their files regularly, so finding a way to automate your backups is essential. Modern computers offer many ways to do this - some of which you must pay for - and taking advantage of them is the key to your success. This article will look at several ways to automate your backups.

Backup Strategies for Macintosh

Apple has diligently striven to make the Macintosh a useful tool for those who live the digital lifestyle, and helping Mac users back up has not been overlooked. Start with .Mac, the online service integrated into Macintosh computers. It's possible - even painless - to synchronize your files over a broadband connection to your .Mac account. I find .Mac a bit pricey for my taste considering most of what it offers I have acquired through other service providers, but you can't beat the convenience: using .Mac and Isync, you can synchronize at the press of a single button.

Apple's second innovative feature for backing up is the under-utilized but tremendously innovative Search Folder concept. Open up a search folder from the Finder and use any criteria you like to search for documents, pictures, and music. The trick here is to make a search folder that displays any files created or modified in the past seven days (for example). You can see where I'm going with this. At a minimum, at the end of every week, zip up a copy of all files you've worked on and email them to yourself or burn them to a CD. You're better protected already. But wait!

Now have a look at Automator, the Mac OS X software with the little robot icon. It's easy to build a little automator script that backs things up for you, and taking advantage of a search folder is a convenient first step. Use a search folder to identify newly created files and then make the second step in your automator script the CD burning, emailing, or whatever you choose to move the backup offsite.

Backup Strategies for Linux

Linux has as many backup tools as it does networking options, all of which will require rolling up your sleeves once and getting dirty. For starters, have a look at the rsync program for synchronizing two machines. This is a command line version of what Chronosync seems to do. You are on your own for networking your Linux box to another machine. This is one of the little things that I enjoy so much about Mac OS X, but that's another story. Once you've linked the machines, have a look at Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier's excellent article at Linux.com. Rsync is complicated and powerful, just what you'd expect.

You can just as easily burn CD backups though. I did my backing up using K3B, one of my favorite pieces of software for the KDE desktop. Alternately, use a shell script to identify your recent documents, tar and zip them up, and then just burn the zipped files to a disk. The following little bash shell script will get the job done.

#!/bin/bash
# Backup script to backup files and folders 
# Randall Wood
# Create the variable bkupdate, which will be appended the
# name of the file

bkupdate="$(date +%F)"

# Begin the backup: recursive, 
# all files newer than 2005-09-01, save to Desktop

tar -cvf /home/randymon/Desktop/backup-$bkupdate.tar.bz2 
         --bzip2 --newer-mtime 2005-09-01 /home/randymon/Documents 

# Badda boom, badda bing. We're done.
echo "Documents directory is backed up."
echo "Current date is" $bkupdate

Storage Media

The next question is, what to do with your backup? You've got several options. For small backups you can transfer the files to your ipod, if you've got one. I've got a decent but not huge music collection, which leaves several free gigabytes of space on my 40G ipod. Apple makes it easy to activate your ipod as a storage device, to which you can transfer your latest back ups. This is the strategy I used when updating my last book. At the end of every writing or editing session I zipped up the complete set of manuscript files and put the latest copy on my ipod. Non ipod users can just as simply take advantage of a USB flashdrive, which are sold these days with capacities in the gigabytes. That will hold a lot of text if you are a writer although it won't help you much with pictures or music.

For the bigger stuff you need to back up to CD or DVD depending on what media your computer is equipped to handle. My Powerbook can only write CDs but the iMac came with a DVD writer. I don't produce any video so at the time the capability seemed wasted on me, but if you save files to DVD you've got a heck of a lot more space on one disk to fill, which is useful. I currently use one DVD for written work, one for pictures, and one for music. At about $1 per disk, that's a low cost back up strategy I can live with, and I store the DVDs off site.

For more capacity still it's possibly worth looking at an external hard drive, the cheapest of which you can find these days for about $100. But you can just as easily use a separate Mac if you happen to have more than one in the family. Here's the trick: using Mac's Bonjour service Macs can "discover" each other over a local network. That is a highly underutilized feature that goes almost top on my list of why Macs are so convenient for home users. If you have two Macs, turn them both on and then from one finder window, browse the network. You'll probably see the other computer listed there (if you don't, you need to turn on the file sharing service from the other Mac so that it broadcasts its presence on the network - see the Sharing menu in the System Configuration). You'll be prompted for your name and password on that machine, and once you've provided it you will be logged in remotely on the other machine. Now transfer across to the other machine whatever you'd like.

Mass file transfer can be a complicated business if you aren't mentally diligent as you work about keeping your stuff organized. For example, if you happen to have different versions of the same document saved on both computers you are in for a whole world of pain. Being careful is the first way to make your life easier - do all your primary development on one machine and use the second as a repository for your backups, or use a flashdrive with two folders - "to machine A" and "to machine B" to keep track of what is going where. But you might find yourself in a situation rather more complex than that, in which case you might need some dedicated backup or synchronization software. Fortunately, several are available.

I am a big fan of Chronosync, which you must pay for but will not regret investing in. Chronosync uses a complicated algorithm to compare and contrast the file structure on the two machines, and then allows you to decide what to do with them. The options are endless but as you can well imagine you can blind copy your entire file structure from one machine to the other, merge and contrast the two machines so both have the latest copy of everything, and many things more complicated than that. My personal backup strategy involves synching two Macs on a weekly or semi-monthly basis, and then burning a complete DVD backup of all my files about once a month. That's an investment in storage media over time, but when disaster strikes, the money will seem like nothing: how much do you spend per month on coffee, anyway?

Final Notes

Two final notes about backing up: First, take good care of your back ups. I once scanned a slew of photos onto CD, and then managed to damage the CD (I scratched the opaque side, and the disk was useless), losing everything. Lesson learned! Keep your CDs and DVDs in plastic or paper sleeves (paper is better, since disks occasionally stick to plastic envelopes) and keep them cool, dry, and safe from extremes of temperature and humidity. Second, keep them away from others. In the age of identity theft you can never be too cautious, and the more you can do to prevent some stranger from lifting a complete set of all your electronic work, the better, particularly in the case of documents like tax records, bank statements, and so on. The really sensitive stuff - the contents of your browser cache, for example - are probably things you won't be manually backing up, but you will sleep better knowing loss of a back up CD won't compromise your finances, your family, or worse.

Postscript

The irony is sickening: the powerbook's hard drive crashed as well, just two one week after the iMac crashed, and only 4 days after writing this snarky article. Thanks to the CD backups I'm still protected (though I'm wondering if I'm going to lose my addressbook? Not sure I backed that up). Still it could have been worse. For the next few weeks I'll be handling the backup CDs with velvet gloves. This qualifies as "catastrophic failure" and I am feeling very grateful it wasn't more catastrophic in terms of data loss than it will be to my wallet. What are you doing still screwing around on the Internet? Close your browser and go backup your stuff!