[fatdoc]

OK,

I admit it, i've been a smug apple lovin git.

After hearing a colleague losing his entire house contents... from a burst pipe in the loft whilst being on holiday.. all the ceilings are down.. the whole shabang.
it doesnt matter what OS you have if its water damaged.

Soooooo.... I have had by base  computa ( old imac) backed up with apples proprietary time machine.. for an age, but is doesnt clone. I want clones, backed up to HDDs that I keep in a safe. not www. based.  [nhs information governance a potential issue]


I need to clone my 2 macbooks,  & one imac. 160Gb on the imac, about 80Gb on each macbook. One has the entire drive encrypted using the mac OS.. I think it's SSL.. is that an issue? i could do with encrypting ever computer i own TBH, for which I would use the apple OS [nhs accept this]

here's the current leader, simply from reviews on the www.

http://shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html

not yet sure if i need to buy multiple licenses... within reason I expect to get what you pay for.

opinions gratefully received..

cheers.

[tomtom]

Good idea to back up in case you get this error too! 

[Bubba]

nhs information governance a potential issue

There must be encrypted online backup solutions?

Why not install a multi-HD NAS securely in your cellar?

[Obi-Wan is lost...]

You need some (free) CCC action, I'm not talking about your local discounted camping warehouse, Carbon Copy Cloner. Easy to use, fully bootable backups. It just works. I know a guy who works for Apple and Time Machine fails to restore his MBP when it died.

http://www.bombich.com/

[fatdoc]

Nice ideas..

Bubs, what's a NAS thingie?

[slackline]

Network Attached Storage

Basically a small, low-power computer which can have 1 or more hard-discs in it.  If there is more than one you can set them up as a RAID so that there is redundancy if one of the discs fails.  They're also useful as you can set the up to run torrent clients (e.g. Transmission) so you can download stuff without having power-hungry desktops/laptops.  If you have lots of music, videos and/or pictures then you have them run uPnP servers so that all the content is available to your PS3.  The files can be shared/accessed from all computers too.

You'd have to investigate how to clone your Macs (do you intend to want to back up the OS itself too?), but (incremental) backing up/mirroring of data is best achieved using rsync.

[Paul B]

Nice ideas..

Bubs, what's a NAS thingie?

Neagear are still doing the offer whereby when you buy a ReadyNas duo with a given capacity, you get the second drive sent free from Seagate. Mine arrived over the weekend so now I'm raid'd  I'm also very happy with it. Easy to setup, east to customize with add-on applications.

Still doesn't protect against, theft or fire though in my instance. Dropbox is then used to backup what I really don't want to lose.

(incidentally I read something interesting re: hotswapping the drives in a Nas as some people do this to keep an off-site backup. Supposedly its not a great idea as the function is only meant for dead drives and then having to completely re-sync a volume puts your Nas under increased load i.e. more likely to get hot and fail etc.)

[fatdoc]

many thanks....

I'm getting a plan in my head...

[fatdoc]

You need some (free) CCC action, I'm not talking about your local discounted camping warehouse, Carbon Copy Cloner. Easy to use, fully bootable backups. It just works. I know a guy who works for Apple and Time Machine fails to restore his MBP when it died.

http://www.bombich.com/

I love you, in every way 
 

[Paul B]

You need some (free) CCC action, I'm not talking about your local discounted camping warehouse, Carbon Copy Cloner. Easy to use, fully bootable backups. It just works. I know a guy who works for Apple and Time Machine fails to restore his MBP when it died.

(Isn't this the same as creating a system image and a boot disc? [built into Win 7  ])

There's a Dlink NAS going cheap on ebuyer at the moment:
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/248760#reviews

[Muenchener]

I've user SuperDuper for years. Never actually had to recover a dead machine from it, but I *do* regularly test booting and running a few things from the backup drive, and it has always worked. My "system" is two backup drives, one in a cupboard at home and one "offsite" at work, and hopefully remembering to swap them every few weeks.

I've toyed with the NAS idea, but so far have always gone through the cycle of :: consider off the shelf options :: read up on how much better an own build option would be :: be daunted by how much work an own build option would be :: remember I've got no power in the cellar anyway :: back to the USB drives.

[slackline]

I considered an own build when I was looking at getting a NAS and whilst I could easily have built a server and system it wouldn't have been as low on power consumption as the Linksys NSLU2 I plumped for (its really what got the whole NAS area off to a start and is great).

Considering upgrading to a NetGear Duo system in the not too distant as they sound pretty good value for money (esp. with the additional drive for free).

[Paul B]

Considering upgrading to a NetGear Duo system in the not too distant as they sound pretty good value for money (esp. with the additional drive for free).

only until Xmas I believe but god knows what they might offer awterwards.
The problem I find (found) with USB drives as backups is they rely too much on me and its easy to push backups to the end of a long to-do list whilst now I have my desktop churning out regularly saved data files from my work and then a real-time backup to a redundant array (team this up with ReadyNAS remote and I can be analysing data at UNI which is being generated at home!).

[slackline]

Yeah, clocked the "before 31st December" catch, in two minds about whether to grab one or wait and see  (plus need to convince wife its required, but she's using her laptop more and more these days so backing it up should appeal)