Following advice from friends, I bought a Maxtor external hard drive, to use for backing up my Powerbook. Since I’ve got quite a lot of data, some of it dating back over ten years, I thought I’d write up how I’m managing backups. I think it’s simple enough to manageable and thorough enough to be reasonably safe.

Principle 1: All hard drives crash eventually. The only thing you have any control over is the amount of time that elapses between the crash and the last time you copied your data off that drive.

Corollary to Principle 1: There should always be at least two copies of everything.

1. get a drive that’s about 200% of all of your current data collection (or more than one drive)
2. partition the drive into a bootable backup and an archive partition
3. copy all non-current stuff off your laptop onto the archive partition. Optionally copy all those old CD backups, old filesystems, tarballs on your webserver and so on onto the archive partition too.
4. set up something (Dejavu or SuperDuper or something involving rsync) to easily recreate a bootable backup onto the backup partition. Run it daily. If it’s incremental rather than a simple copy, it’ll be quicker.
5. do one full backup of everything on the archive partition onto DVDs. Make them good quality disks that’ll last. Hell, make two copies if you can be bothered. Set up a Smart Folder (if you have Tiger) for all files on the archive partition that were modified after the full backup.
6. as things become less current, copy them off the laptop and onto the archive partition. When the non-backed-up folder reaches roughly a DVD’s worth of data, pop a DVD in the drive and back it up. To be safe, you shouldn’t delete archived stuff off the laptop until you’ve burnt the DVD.
7. repeat.

That full backup took me a couple of days to do, so I used Finder colours to mark the folder I was currently backing up (orange) and the one’s that I’d done (green). Helps to not get lost. That code might work just as well as the Smart Folder for keeping track of what needs to get backed up.

There’s probably an easier alternative strategy of just buying a second external drive and mirroring the archive partition to that every week or so, but my terror of loss isn’t sufficient to pony up the cash for another drive.

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