Chuqui 3.0: More than you wanted to know about backups
Dave
· 1 month ago
An employee cut the AC over a hot weekend to save $$$. Monday I arrived to discover two dead iMacs. Both disks had been cooked. Luckily 30 days earlier I had upgraded my Intel Xserve to Snow Leopard and added a Drobo Pro with 16TB of disk. I was running backups 24X7 via TimeMachine for all 12 workstations in the office.
Two new disks, two fresh OS X Snow Leopard installs (as long as I needed to rebuild, why not upgrade the OS?) and what the heck... I told these fresh Snow Leopards to recover their data from the Drobo Pro. In just a tad over an hour I had recovered 100% of my data—on both systems! I celebrated by upgrading all my workstations to Snow Leopard.
Disk is CHEAP. Next I will add CrashPlan Pro to backup my Drobo Pro backups to another building that is connected via fiber optics. A new Mac Mini Server and another Drobo Pro will set me back about $3500, but then I can really SLEEP AT NIGHT!
lkern
· 1 month ago
Time Machine is perhaps THE single best utility ever made. JUST TONIGHT I recovered my tower in about an hour after some really strange events.
mikebaird
· 1 month ago
Chuqui, This is a great exposition - I'll bookmark and return and refer others for sure - you are my kind of techie!
lkern
· 1 month ago
Advice to readers: What he said. I am paranoid about backups, and my job depends on them. A combination of FW drives, Drobo, Time Capsule, Apple's Backup, Retrospect 8, Mac Mini's and Carbon Copy Cloner takes care of about 20TB of data at work and home, most of it backing up incrementally daily. But still, even with something this robust, I lose sleep over the BIG things like our main database that uses Oracle. There is such a thing as overkill, but I'm thinking not in the case of critical data. In a word: REDUNDANCY. Where you think 2 backups will do, consider four.
theMacDude
· 1 month ago
Thank you once again Chuq. I'm ordering more drives soon and seriously considering giving them out as holiday gifts...
All Comments
Two new disks, two fresh OS X Snow Leopard installs (as long as I needed to rebuild, why not upgrade the OS?) and what the heck... I told these fresh Snow Leopards to recover their data from the Drobo Pro. In just a tad over an hour I had recovered 100% of my data—on both systems! I celebrated by upgrading all my workstations to Snow Leopard.
Disk is CHEAP. Next I will add CrashPlan Pro to backup my Drobo Pro backups to another building that is connected via fiber optics. A new Mac Mini Server and another Drobo Pro will set me back about $3500, but then I can really SLEEP AT NIGHT!
I am paranoid about backups, and my job depends on them. A combination of FW drives, Drobo, Time Capsule, Apple's Backup, Retrospect 8, Mac Mini's and Carbon Copy Cloner takes care of about 20TB of data at work and home, most of it backing up incrementally daily. But still, even with something this robust, I lose sleep over the BIG things like our main database that uses Oracle. There is such a thing as overkill, but I'm thinking not in the case of critical data. In a word: REDUNDANCY. Where you think 2 backups will do, consider four.