Is your computer backed up? With 2T hard disks at around $100, there’s no excuse not to have your computer backed up. At the very least, you should have an external USB Hard Disk with some kind of backup on it. If you haven’t – do it now! This is the easiest way.

As for me – it’s the start of the New Year so I’ve re-evaluated my backup regime. I think it’s working well. Here’s what it is:

Backup 1 – Time Machine.

I have a 2TB external USB hard drive with an automatic time-machine backup. I can go back an ‘undelete’ or find any file I’ve deleted in the past year or so. If my main Hard Drive fails, my data is backed up hourly. How to setup time-machine.

Backup 2 – Manual Copy to USB Drive.

I have a 1.5TB  external USB hard drive that I backup manually with Carbon Copy Cloner each month (well, probably 3 monthly, but I aim for monthly). Backup 1 is not bootable. It’s useful to recover information off, but not to get things up and running in a hurry. My backup 2 is bootable so I can reboot and be running off it in a minute or so. How to make a bootable backup.

Backup 3 – Offsite Copy to USB Drive.

I have another version of my 1.5TB backup – an exact copy of backup 2, which I keep offsite at a friends place.  I swap it every 6 months or so , so that if my computer gets stolen I at least have an off-site copy of all my files that’s reasonably recent. When I go to my friend’s place I occasionally take the new drive and pickup the old one.

Extra Precautions.

I also run my computer’s main Hard Disk in a Pegasus RAID array. This is a bit fanatical for the home user, but worth it if your work is stored on your computer. Basically the data is stored on more than one drive. If one of my hard drives fail, my computer will just keep going, and tell me to replace the faulty drive. When I replace the faulty drive it will repair itself.

What about you?

I’ll say it again, at the very least, you should have an external USB Hard Disk with some kind of backup on it – either a Time-Machine backup OR a manual backup of your entire computer. If you haven’t… do it now!  

Also think about ALL your computers. I had an old laptop I use spasmodically and didn’t bother backing out up. It got stolen recently and the hassle of having to set it all up again is not worth it so back up everything!

If your hard drive fails – it’s too late! I cannot count the number of times people have come to me with a broken hard drive asking if I can get data off it, and they didn’t have a backup.  Think of all the data on your computer: photos, word processing documents, music, etc.  If you lost it all, would it be worth $100 to get it back? If so then get it backed up now!