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A short post about backups
Jan. 3rd, 2016 04:30 pmI thought I would write down what I do to back up my computer (a laptop running Mac OS X), since it took a surprising amount of time to figure out.
I have a private Github repository containing most of the text files I create that I want backed-up and versioned. This costs me $7/month, which is well worth it to me.
Camera phone pictures, and any documents I want to be able to share and/or access easily from my phone and from computers other than my own, go on Google Drive. I pay $2/month for 100 GB of storage, most of which I'm not using.
I back up most of the files in my home directory on my laptop with rsync to rsync.net. This costs me $5/month for 50 GB of storage. I followed their instructions to do nightly backups (which I schedule for 3 AM when my laptop is usually plugged in and on a network, but I'm not using it) using launchd. Doing the initial backup took me over a month, because of somewhat unreliable Internet access and because of the time it took to sift through and figure out what files I could delete and which ones I didn't need a cloud backup of in order to stay under quota. (Part of that time was the time it took for me to consolidate about 5 different external hard drives containing the past 18 years of backups onto my laptop hard disk.) Since I only have 50 GB, I don't back up my music library onto rsync, figuring that a TimeMachine backup is enough and that in the worst case, I can replace almost all of it from the Internet or CDs.
Once a week I plug in my TimeMachine disk and let it do its work, so I always have a full backup that's no more than a week old in addition to the partial cloud backups that I get from git, Google Drive, and rsync.net. Of course, this doesn't help if my house burns down, but does help if my laptop gets lost or stolen when I'm not at home since I keep the backup disk at home.
Writing this, I'm not sure why I'm paying for both rsync and Google Drive, since I have more storage on Google Drive and am paying less. I wanted something that was easy to automate using the command line, but I haven't actually looked into options for doing automatic backups to Google Drive. On the other hand, it took me so much time to get regularly scheduled rsync backups working that I'm reluctant to put more time into it.
I haven't yet figured out how to back up my phone (Android); there doesn't seem to be a good way to back up everything (including text messages) without rooting my phone. I've been reluctant to put in the time required to root my phone, but it looks like I will have to. Suggestions welcome!
I have a private Github repository containing most of the text files I create that I want backed-up and versioned. This costs me $7/month, which is well worth it to me.
Camera phone pictures, and any documents I want to be able to share and/or access easily from my phone and from computers other than my own, go on Google Drive. I pay $2/month for 100 GB of storage, most of which I'm not using.
I back up most of the files in my home directory on my laptop with rsync to rsync.net. This costs me $5/month for 50 GB of storage. I followed their instructions to do nightly backups (which I schedule for 3 AM when my laptop is usually plugged in and on a network, but I'm not using it) using launchd. Doing the initial backup took me over a month, because of somewhat unreliable Internet access and because of the time it took to sift through and figure out what files I could delete and which ones I didn't need a cloud backup of in order to stay under quota. (Part of that time was the time it took for me to consolidate about 5 different external hard drives containing the past 18 years of backups onto my laptop hard disk.) Since I only have 50 GB, I don't back up my music library onto rsync, figuring that a TimeMachine backup is enough and that in the worst case, I can replace almost all of it from the Internet or CDs.
Once a week I plug in my TimeMachine disk and let it do its work, so I always have a full backup that's no more than a week old in addition to the partial cloud backups that I get from git, Google Drive, and rsync.net. Of course, this doesn't help if my house burns down, but does help if my laptop gets lost or stolen when I'm not at home since I keep the backup disk at home.
Writing this, I'm not sure why I'm paying for both rsync and Google Drive, since I have more storage on Google Drive and am paying less. I wanted something that was easy to automate using the command line, but I haven't actually looked into options for doing automatic backups to Google Drive. On the other hand, it took me so much time to get regularly scheduled rsync backups working that I'm reluctant to put more time into it.
I haven't yet figured out how to back up my phone (Android); there doesn't seem to be a good way to back up everything (including text messages) without rooting my phone. I've been reluctant to put in the time required to root my phone, but it looks like I will have to. Suggestions welcome!