Having learned many years ago that keeping multiple backs is essential I decided to add an external drive to my MacBook Pro workstation. I had been backing up to me XServe but the high power cost of running a server and RAID which I primarily access for archival and storage was not making very much economic sense.
I am currently paying about $.37/kWH at the 300% over baseline tier rate which works out to $133/month to leave the server on 24/7. So, now I am setting up the system to be turned on remotely only when I want to access files or to backup.
So my new strategy is to use the external drive as my primary backup with a periodic backup to the server. With that in mind, I formated the new external 500GB drive into 3 partitions as follows.
- Installer
- 8GB partition for Leopard Installer
- Mirror
- 190GB partition mirror image of my internal drive
- TM
- 267GB partition for Time Machine
Installer
This partition contains the copy of Leopard Installer I create with Superduper. If my internal goes down I should be able to reboot from this partition to recover the Time Machine backup contained in the TM parition. Also will contain the 10.5.2 update when it becomes available.
Mirror
I setup Superduper to backup my entire internal hard drive every morning at 4AM. A time which I am least likely to be using the computer. At first I was going to only backup the system minus the /Users folders but decided to consider the /Users as just another backup of my home folder just in case Time Machine goes bonkers. I should not be trusting my data entirely with new technology.
TM
I decided to use Time Machine as my secondary backup of my home folder in addition to he daily backup onto the Mirror partition primarily for the snap shot capability. I set up TM to exclude the system files as they can be readily restored from either the daily backup on Mirror or from the Installer. I also excluded the following very large folders which don’t really need to be backed up at all.
Summary
I will continue making periodic backups to the server at least twice a week. When I get time I will write up a script to watch for the server being available and startup my backup whenever I bring it online. Using the new FSEvents to keep track of changes between backups would be nice. Wondering if this might be a possible product now that I think about it. Once configured, the program would notice the backup volume is available and start to copy over the changes since the last time the volume was online.