Mac OS X Leopard only: If you’ve got a FireWire drive hooked up to your Mac, chances are Leopard’s dead simple backup utility, Time Machine, has you backing up your data—and that’s a huge step forward if you weren’t backing up at all pre-Leopard. But Time Machine is only one piece of a full backup scheme. Macworld runs down what Time Machine can do (effortless, regular, intervention-less local backups) and what it can’t (system clones and online backup). If you want to complete your backup scheme, use an online service (Mozy Home Unlimited is the best 5 bucks I spend per month) and once in awhile, mirror your entire system to a bootable drive. That way if your FireWire drive gets stolen or dies, or your whole system crashes, you’ll be up and running instantaneously. What other backup services do you use in addition to Time Machine? Tell us in the comments. Is Time Machine all you need? [Macworld]
Windows only: Rip and back up any DVD to your hard drive with DVD Rip, a freeware Windows application that automates the entire DVD-to-hard-drive backup process. All you need to do is insert your DVD, run DVD Rip, and let it take care of the rest. Why? A while back I explained why I’d soured on optical media, the gist of which was the ease with with DVDs are damaged. Sick of scratched, skippy DVDs, I put together a simple AutoHotkey script that automated DVD rips in conjunction with a freeware application called DVD Shrink. I’ve since gone back and drastically improved the original DVD Rip application complete with options and improved automation.
Mac OS X only: The latest version of our favorite system cloning/backup utility for Mac, SuperDuper, is now fully Leopard compatible. What do you need a third party backup utility for when you’re rockin’ Time Machine, you ask? Good question, friend. While Time Machine is incredible for incremental file backups that happen in the background, without intervention, SuperDuper’s strength is its ability to clone your entire Mac onto a bootable backup, which Time Machine does not do—well, not as easily as SuperDuper does.
Windows only: Want a place to stash your files but lack a home server or need more than Mozy’s free 2 GB? Zoogmo, a peer-to-peer file backup program, lets you utilise your buddies (the ones with huge hard drives, anyways) for reciprocal backup. After you both install the client software, you can search each other out and trade files back and forth in an interface familiar to anybody who’s done some file-sharing. Each file, however, can only be 50 MB during Zoogmo’s beta period, so don’t expect to trade many video files (or large databases). Zoogmo is a free download for Windows systems only, requires a free sign-up to use. Zoogmo [via Download Squad]
Hard drives fail, and they do it much more often than we’d like to think. Even if you’ve set up automated hard drive backups, you’re not necessarily getting the best backup bang for your buck—especially if your operating system’s main hard drive fails. Even if you’ve been backing up your important files, you’ll still need to reinstall your OS and go through the pain of copying your files back to your new hard drive, installing new applications, and setting up your system to how you had it. There’s a better way, my friends. With a RAID 1 array, you’ll always have a perfect backup of your hard drive so that—in the event that one drive fails—the other will seamlessly pick up where it left off. That means no reinstalling your operating system, no reinstalling applications, and no time lost in the event of a hard drive failure.
Of course you know all about Time Machine’s marquee feature—the ability to browse your files back in time—but Blogger James Duncan Davidson details Time machine’s equally-excellent-in-its-simplicity feature: restoring an entire system after a hard drive crash. The process is painless. Simply boot from the Leopard install disc with a fresh hard drive in place of your crashed drive; instead of continuing with the install process, go to Utilities -> Restore System from Backup. Then select your backup source (your Time Machine drive), choose which backup you want to restore (most likely you’ll want the most recent), then pick the destination drive (your new drive). Then it’s simply a matter of kicking back and waiting for Time Machine to do its magic. When all’s said and done, your entire system (with a few small exceptions) should be back in the exact same state you left it. I’ve already done this a couple of times myself, and frankly, it feels good. The simplicity of Time Machine really does compel you.
Restoring from Time Machine [DuncanDavidson via TUAW]The MacTipper blog posts the command that will start Time Machine’s backup process (and run it in the background) from the Terminal:
/System/Library/CoreServices/backupd.bundle/Contents/Resources/backupd-helper &Why would you want to do this? Perhaps to kick off a TM backup through an iCal event reminder at exactly the time you want it to start, or combined with a reminder to plug in your FireWire drive and get backing up. Hit up the MacTipper link to get that AppleScript. Use Time Machine Through the Terminal [MacTipper]
Linux only: Free open source backup utility FlyBack exists to offer part of the features in Mac OS X Leopard’s vaunted Time Machine—at least the part involving set-it-and-forget-it, time-stamped backups. Install and load FlyBack, tell it where your external drive is and which folders you want to back up and when, and the program sets up your Linux system’s cron scheduler to do it. The program is still in its infancy, but has come a long way since a buggy version I gave up on in early November, and I prefer the pared-down interface edges to more advanced apps like TimeVault. FlyBack is a free download for Linux systems and may require installing a few Python libraries to get running (detailed at the project page)
FlyBack [Google Code via Mad Penguin]Now that Leopard’s long since dropped and the masses have seen the simple power of Time Machine, it might be a good time to take another look at similar solutions for other systems. Luckily, the Howto Forge has posted a helpful step-by-step through installing and configuring TimeVault, an integrated backup solution for Ubuntu and Debian-based Linux distributions. The tutorial walks through the process on an Ubuntu system, but would likely help other GNOME-based systems get most of the way there. If you’re more the DIY, terminal-hacking type, you can always use cross-platform solution rsync to get the job done.
Creating Snapshot Backups Of Your Desktop With Timevault On Ubuntu 7.10 [via The Linux Tutorial]Windows only: Archive all your email messages to DVD or to your hard drive with MailStore Home, a desktop email import, search, and archiving utility. Fire up MailStore Home and import any POP/IMAP email (like Gmail or Yahoo Mail) or Outlook, Windows Mail, or Thunderbird email. MailStore Home sucks in all your messages and lets you burn a backup disk or store and search your entire library locally for when you’re offline. MailStore Home also has some disk space conservation smarts, and it doesn’t lock your messages into a proprietary format.
