Last weekend I had two hard drives fail and it’s taken me all week to deal with it. It’s been a major hassle, but luckily I’ve not lost any data.
How was I safe? One of the drives that failed was one I used for storage and the other drive was one of my back up drives. I ended up safe because I have a two back-up drives and I use Crashplan, an online backup service. So even even though I lost a full back-up I was able to restore everyting.
My exact back-up strategy is…
- Time Machine back-up of my main hard drive and all other important files (photos, writings, comic pages, etc…).
- Cloaned back-up of my main system and all important files using Superduper! Drive.
- Crashplan subscription that back-ups EVERYTHING.
This three prong system works well because as it happened this weekend I lost both a big hard drive and a back-up within a day of each other. Having that second cloaned back-up on hand saved my butt. It’s really important to have a back-up for a back-up. Then I think using Crashplan or even Carbonite to back-up remotely is just as important because should my house suffer a fire, flood, or whatever my data will still be safe thanks to it.
Where I hit problems is that once I got everything up and running again (I now have two new 4TB hard drives) I decided it was time to upgrade to Mavericks the newest operating system for Macs. I re-backed up everything and then did the install. The install went smooth but once it was up and running a lot of programs didn’t work and required a clean install. That took more than a day and was a total pain in the butt. Plus there have been odd anomolies like how the new version of Quicktime won’t open a video file without first trying to convert it!
This week sucked but I’m ending it with all my data intact. My writings & photos are who I am and I would be devistated if I lost them all. So my advice is that if you don’t have a back-up system make sure you take the time to set one up.