There’s an old saying about backing up your system. You only ever take backing up seriously if you’ve suffered a disaster.
For me, that was the failure of a drive that resulted in the loss of all my digital photos. That was literally thousands of photos covering almost 15 years of family history. I got lucky as I found an almost complete archive of my photos that was missing only the last six months – and I was able to retrieve those as, by then, all my photos were being shot from my iPhone.
How I backup my critical data
When it comes to my working files, I now take a far more cautious approach that is based on the 3-2-1-0 method.
- At least three copies of your data
- Those copies are stored on at least two different media
- One of those copies is stored offsite, away from your main system
- The backups are tested to ensure there are zero errors
In my case, with my data files (the stuff that would be very hard/impossible to reconstruct who’ll something go seriously pear-shaped) I have the following:
- The working copy I use that is local to my machine
- Synchronised copies to iCloud, OneDrive or Google Drive depending on what part of my life/work we are talking about
- Time Machine as a local backup connected to my machine
I intend to bolster that with another external hard drive and use SuperDuper to make a fully clone of my system that I’ll stash away from my home office.
It’s not just backing up – recovery matters
If you have a backup system that works for you that’s great news. But do you have a recovery plan? Backups are only useful if they enable you to recover your data.
If my Mac dies or is stolen it would be annoying but I could reinstall all my main software in less than a day. The good thing about subscription software and mainly acquiring software thorough the Mac App Store is that I don’t have to find a bunch of serial numbers to get things back up and running. As long as I have my passwords (Keychain to the rescue!) I can get everything up and running.
That feels like a reasonable set of mitigations for the risk I’m likely to face.
The way I see it, I’m at greater risk of a hardware failure than anything else. But given my Mac is less than a year old, that doesn’t feel like a likely issue. While a malware attack of some sort is always possible, I feel that I have sufficient controls in place to mitigate the risk of that occurring.
File sync services are not really backups
In my backup plan, you’ll notice I use file synchronisation services from Apple, Google and Microsoft for different sets of data. Strictly speaking, these are not backups. A true backup is more isolated from your main data so that an erroneous or malicious change to your data is not stored. If something bad happens to one of the files that’s synced to one of those services, that change will be sent to my synchronised copy almost instantly.
This is why Time Machine is important to me. It allows me to go back to a specific point in time so I can recover a ‘broken’ file from a pint in time before it was damaged or corrupted.
That’s important to consider if you rely on a file sync service as a backup.
Anthony is the founder of Australian Apple News. He is a long-time Apple user and former editor of Australian Macworld. He has contributed to many technology magazines and newspapers as well as appearing regularly on radio and occasionally on TV.