To be honest, I’ve never been big on personal data backups. I know, I know…it’s a sin and contradictory thing to say, especially for a technology guru such as myself. It’s not that I don’t understand the utility of the backup—I run an I.T. department for Christ’s sake! It’s just that I’ve never had a catastrophic event in my personal computing life to warrant such a heavy-handed process. I’ve never had unrecoverable hard disk failures and I’ve never contracted a virus that put me out of commission (…hoping I didn’t just jinx myself). I’ve been fortunate, no doubt, but also very smart in my personal computing behaviors. But now I’m having data management problems and I need a strategy to help me understand my own data as well as protect me in the event I do have a digital meltdown.
Here’s an overview of my digital life:
- Computers
- MacBook Pro – My workhorse. All of my computing is done on this machine. I have email, software, source code, photos, videos and a partial iTunes library on the local disk. My iPhone also syncs to this computer. It has a 300GB 7200RPM drive with about 60GB free.
- Gateway Desktop – My old “media” machine. This machine has an Ubuntu virtual machine that serves as my development MySQL server. It also has my entire iTunes library (music, TV shows and movies) and serves as a sync point for my Apple TV. About 225GB of local storage.
- Apple TV
– fairly obvious what this does.
- Storage Devices
- 250GB Western Digital USB – This was used for a test of Time Machine from a prior OS X install.
- 500GB LaCie FW400 – I originally purchased this to store video and Aperture vault. It’s out of space.
- 7 x 4GB SDHC Card
, 1 x 16GB SDHC cards – Used for video cameras
- Multiple USB Key drives – My newest is the LaCie iamakey 8 GB USB 2.0 Flash Drive 130870
– very cool, shaped like a key, fits on keychain, haven’t needed to use it
- Capture Devices & Media
- Photos – I shoot primarily with my Canon 40D in RAW mode. Obviously my iPhone also takes pictures. I will eventually add a new point-and-shoot to this arsenal.
- Raw, Digitized and Produced Video – I have four video cameras: Canon HF10 (1080p), an Aiptek 720p, a Flip Video and my iPhone 3GS. The Canon and Aiptek take SDHC cards. The Canon also has an additional 16GB built-in drive. Edited video output from either iMovie or Final Cut Express.
- Raw and Produced Audio – I’ve got older backups (yes, I do make some backups) of ProTools sessions on DVDs and CDs. I will re-incorporate them into this new strategy.
- Applications
- Development Stuff – Source code (PHP and SQL), images, databases, etc.
- Aperture – My real photography library and processing tool.
- iPhoto – Photo library for iPhone and other casual photographs.
- iMovie – For quick video edits
- Final Cut Express – For more in-depth video edits
- Online
- Domains – Many websites with WordPress blogs, one domain with Joomla, custom PHP code, images, misc. files
- Databases – Many MySQL databases
My goal is to find an easy and somewhat affordable solution to help manage this stuff. If it isn’t easy, I won’t do it. Here are some of my requirements and tasks:
- Reduce desk clutter – I currently have crap all over my desk, including all those pesky SDHC cards and USB drives
- Incorporate Time Machine backups
- Easy means to transfer raw video from cameras and SDHC cards to allow reuse. I don’t think I need so many of these cards.
- Identify super important things that need multiple backups (e.g. backup to disk and DVD or online backup)
- Network sharing – this is rather low on the list. As I said before, I only do real computing on one machine (to avoid syncing multiple machines), but with Apple TV and the rumored Apple Tablet… hmmm
- Incorporate source code repository – I used to use subversion, but after last OS reinstall I fell off the wagon. This could be a pure cloud play.
- Schedule all database backups – Currently I use MySQL Admin and download daily or weekly backups of databases. Problem here is I do not get all of my databases backed up and I don’t get the ones I do backup all the time because I do this on my laptop which is not always on or connected to internet.
- Social network backups – Not sure if I want all that data, but might as well think about it. A friend referred me to LifeStreamBackup.com, so I’ll research further.
- Find a way to automate as much application-based backups as possible, such as Aperture’s Vault.
