Stay with me here for a minute; I'm slowly creeping back to my pre-Katrina level of backup. This would include (and FWIW, I have a G5 dual 2GHz):

* Twin internal Hitachi 250GB Drives, in a Mirror RAID via SoftRAID
* External 320GB Hardware RAID HD
* miniStack 250GB drive (newest addition)

Rotating backup, which goes off-site, includes:

* two external 250GB HDs

I also have a third 250GB HD, which my wife is using on her iMac as backup these days.

I use SuperDuper to clone my system to the externals on an at-least-once-daily basis.

At my old office, I had the external 320 set up as part of the SoftRAID volume (so I had two internals and one RAID external) set up as one big RAID, which covered me for mechanical failure. The two externals would rotate backup; one was always at another location (home) so I was covered for loss of the system (fire, theft, or (ha ha) hurricane).

So, then, do I have too much backup? I was considering going down to the twin internal RAID (which is all that's set up now) along with the two external drives (which I'd rotate to a friend's here a couple of times a week). I might move to twin external miniStack drives.

And a MacBook Pro. But that's another thread.

Backups are good only if you test them.

If you don't test your backups.....it's as bad as not having a backup.

So how do you test your backups?

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In the words of DharmaDog: "it may or may not be utter horse@#$%&, but it shouldn't be dismissed simply because it doesn't agree with your opinion."

Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.

Trying is the first step to failure. -- Homer Simpson

no but JLo has quite a bit. . .


just be careful. . .when she backs dat thing up?

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I reject your reality and substitute my own!

elmo3,

My backup got the ultimate test when I bugged out for Katrina back in August. I ran my whole company (and communicated with family & friends) from the backup drive for about a month as a boot drive on a borrowed Mac. Later, I was able to secure an iMac (which is now my wife's Mac) which served as my main Mac until I got back to New Orleans in January to close down my office and retrieve my PowerMac.

I agree, though; backups need to be tested regularly. I would occasionally boot up from the backup drive on one of my home Macs (either an old G4 iMac or my kids' former eMac), and sometimes work from files on it (saving me a trip to the office).

Still and all, I think the move to a portable is going to happen for me in the coming months; once the next MacBooks come out, I may make the move. Trouble for me is the small HD at the moment, but I'm hopeful we'll see a nice boost in sizes available in the coming months (I think I'll post a separate thread on that).

/Z

Zoidberg Wrote:
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> elmo3,
>
> My backup got the ultimate test when I bugged out
> for Katrina back in August.

For the lurkers: that is *not* the proper procedure for *testing* your backups.

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In the words of DharmaDog: "it may or may not be utter horse@#$%&, but it shouldn't be dismissed simply because it doesn't agree with your opinion."

Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.

Trying is the first step to failure. -- Homer Simpson

FireWire drives should not be considered reliable on an absolute data integrity basis. If you are running a business off of it, you need a daily backup along with two other rotating weekly backups that (you learned) should be kept in significantly different secure locations.

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In tha 360. MRF User Map

there is no such thing as too much backup.