Time Machine

All my computer life I have lived dangerously, meaning running without back-up. I have upgraded computers just enough to have fresh disk drives. And I've never had a computer stolen or burned up or crushed. I've been blessed.

For much of this time, I didn't really have any data that I'd miss. Any really important file would be saved to a floppy or ZIP disk. Then gradually I built up a large archive of personal writings and research, and large libraries of photographs, videos, and music recordings, to the tune of several hundred gigabytes. Only hard drive backup offered enough storage to provide data redundancy. The thought of losing all this hard work really began to weigh on me and I began keeping duplicate copies of folders on separate drives to provide some redundancy. But this became unworkable, as keeping files synchronized was a nightmare.

My one disk failure was just over a year ago, the near catastrophe that got me to clean up my storage act. Fortunately, I bought the nifty Prosoft software, DataRescueII, and was able to reclaim all my files from the unusable drive. Which is truly amazing, because it was a striped pair that went bad. I bought a 750 GB Barracuda and an external SATA enclosure. I had to place the new drive and one half the striped pair in the two internal PowerMac G5 slots, and the other striped pair half in an external SATA enclosure, and was able to retrieve all the RAID files onto the new drive. Apparently it was some file system control sector that went bad, not a drive hardware failure, because I was able to format the striped pair disks and copy the restored data back. Pretty amazing, and lucky. Thanks, Prosoft.

I began researching backup software for Macs just after I upgraded to Leopard. I had never heard of Time Machine, but it was the buzz for the Mac and it was already on my hard drive, as part of Leopard. More luck. So I put my new 750GB Barracuda in my external SATA case, assigned it to Time Machine, and presto, the next morning I was fully backed-up. Automagic. Nice work Apple.

Since, I have upgraded my internal striped pair, of 300 GB total, to a 2-platter Barracuda of 640 GB, with another separate 320 GB single-platter Barracuda as an internal scratch disk. It was no problem to initialize the new drive from my backup drive. No more striping for me. The new drive with 32 MB buffer seems plenty fast.

But I knew that a fire or theft would still wipe me out, so thus entered a second 750 GB Barracuda backup drive. I've gone from no redundancy to double redundancy. I keep one of the backup drives off-site, and bring it back every couple of weeks to update it. My backups are housed in LaCie d2 Quad enclosures that offer USB, Firewire, and SATA connectivity. I picked up all the drives and external enclosures on eBay for a song. Imagine, 2.4 TB of storage online at once. It wasn't long ago that 40 MB seemed like enough. Thanks Seagate, LaCie, and eBay.

It's about time to turn in. I hope everyone can sleep as well as I do these days.