Tech Blog

[#1]

We've all heard the adage, there are two things inevitable in life: death and taxes. I'd like to add to that: hard drive failure. No matter what anyone says, eventually hard drives (and computers) will fail. This, my friends, is one the most important reasons we run backups. Oh sure, occasionally we accidentally get a file back that we deleted, but really a back up is in case of your system going totally kaput.

Just so you think that this doesn't happen to "power users", well it happened to John Gruber of Daring Fireball recently— Daring Fireball: An Ode to DiskWarrior, SuperDuper, and Dropbox —and there is a great lesson here.

First, both SuperDuper! and DropBox are free for basic use. Next John points out one of the most important things about backups: redundancy .

I'm sure John has Time Machine running, but he also uses a SuperDuper! to back up his machine every night. SuperDuper! not only makes a backup of your drive, but a bootable backup so you can reboot from the backup drive if there is a problem.

Disk Warrior , which let John make a disk image of his drive, is invaluable. I've saved a couple drives myself with it.

Right now, myself, I have TimeMachine, CrashPlan for remote backup, and DropBox for some critical files (like my books).

Am I going to add a SuperDuper! (or CarbonCopyCloner) backup to my own safety net?

Yep.

It goes nicely with the 16 gig bootable flashdrive with Ubuntu I have on my keychain.