BACKUP...? Time Machine??...

Recently I stumbled on a website which mentioned something along the lines of 'always have 3 copies of everything' and it made me think.. do i?

Up until (very) recently I had my mac set up as follows (WARNING: the following might sound a bit geeky!).....

2x 1TB Samsumg Hard drives set up in RAID 1 which means they mirror everything (so that hard drive B has a copy of everything on hard drive A). This is good for redundancy purposes i.e. if something went wrong with 1 hard drive i've still got the other with everything on it that the failed one had.
I also had a 500GB external hard drive which kept a backup of my Aperture vault (over 300GB of photos!). Also, I had a 500GB internal drive where i stored movies, music and it was also used as a scratch disk for Final Cut.

Time Machine

I use a Mac which can utilise a thing called the Time Machine which is built into the operating system. Judging by the reviews of it and demonstrations on the apple website, it looks pretty decent - it can literally go back in time and recover something you deleted yesterday, a week ago, even a month or two ago!

I was curious about it so I decided to test it out. I pulled one of my RAIDed 1TB hard drives out and hooked it up to an external enclosure (from eBay for about £20) formatted it and within seconds my mac asked me if i wanted to use it as a 'Time Machine Backup'. (Note here that my system still worked exactly like it did before - even by pulling one of the RAIDed hard drives!)

It took around 10hrs (i left it over night) for Time Machine to copy everything from my 1TB main system disk to the backup (approx 700GB of data). From my applications to photos, documents to 3D work, everything was backed up. The great thing about time machine is that it generates a backup of files that have been changed, deleted or modified - so it isnt just copying anything and everything.

I bought an Iomega Prestige 1TB hard drive yesterday so add to my time machine backup - so i'd have 2 time machine backups of my hard drive. One (the nicer looking Iomega drive) will be kept beside my mac constantly backing up and the other will be kept elsewhere, in another room or offsite, and backed up weekly. Its a good failsafe in case anything massively crazy happened like a fire or freak powersurge that could fry ALL power-connected hardware.

So far so good!

Sunny :]