I hooked up a spare USB drive to my Mac a couple of weeks ago and turned on Time Machine. Seems to be very easy to use; certainly the process of making backups is painless, and while I haven’t tried a restore yet, the GUI looks easy to manage. My only complaint so far is that it doesn’t seem focused on people like me who are only plugging in a backup drive at sporadic intervals: it wants to back up every hour, at 48 minutes after the hour, and insists on that schedule even if I just plugged in the backup drive for the first time in a few days. (So if I attach the backup drive at, say, 9:02, then I have to wait 46 minutes for my next backup, even if I haven’t backed up the computer for days.)
If you have a Mac, I highly recommend it: spend 100 bucks (or whatever) on a USB drive, set up your environment so that drive is near a location where you frequently use your laptop, and get in the habit of connecting the two periodically. (If you have a desktop, then just leave it plugged in all the time.)
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Or you could use JungleDisk (dot com), which has the advantage of being portable to Windows and Linux systems. It backs up your data into Amazon S3, which guarantees at least three replicas in as many data centers, professionally maintained and secured. You can encrypt the data in flight, and (for an extra fee) get access to it via the Web. The SLA guarantees three-nines accessibility, and I’ve never experienced an outage.
You can also copy files back and forth on demand independently of regular backup, and can mount JungleDisk as a WebDAV server.
The cost is $20 for the program (including a lifetime supply of updates) and Amazon’s S3 charges, which are about $0.15 per gigabyte per month for storage, and about $0.15 per gigabyte for transfers (a little cheaper inbound, a little more expensive outbound). In my case, it runs to less than $5 per month — well worth it.
Disclaimer I have no connection with JungleDisk or Amazon except that of a very satisfied customer. If my employer had a service like this, I’d probably point you there.
2/3/2008 @ 1:31 pm
For sporadic usage, try simply setting Time Machine’s switch to ‘OFF,’ and every time you want it to do a backup, just click-hold/ctrl-click on its dock-icon, and select ‘Backup now,’ or whatever that option says.
2/3/2008 @ 1:58 pm
Chris, thanks for the suggestion: I’ll give it a try.
John: yes, absolutely. (I have my main files backed up offsite; I’m waiting for the numbers to be such that I can use a service like that for other stuff, e.g. media files.) Though even in such a situation I’d be tempted to augment it with Time Machine: the idea of being able to quickly restore a copy of a file from a more or less arbitrary point in time rather appeals to me.
2/4/2008 @ 9:02 pm
[…] method”. (Hey Jim, start updating your blog and I’ll actually link to it! ) And I started using Time Machine; as John Cowan reminded me, I’m using it in ways that are seriously lacking from the […]
3/19/2008 @ 8:57 pm