Backups

Hardware
You need one of the following hardware to backup your Mac:
1. Second (usually external) Hard Drive - get this before anything else
2. Removable storage such as a zip or jaz drive.
3. CD-R or CDRW (Compact Disk-Recordable)
4. Tape Drives

I recommend a second hard because you can get a lot a storage for the money. You can easily set up a duplicate system on the second drive to start up your system if your primary drive fails; thus, you can keep working if you need to when your primary drive meets its maker. Use the 'command- option- shift- delete' key combination to startup from any external device (hard drive). If you need to archive data that changes a lot, get a removeable storage device when your data no longer fits on one hard drive. If you need to archive data that rarely or almost never changes, buy a CD-R. When DVD's become more common, a DVD-RAM might be your choice. I personally dislike tape backups because my personal experience has found them to be very time comsuming to retrieve data from, but if you have very large amounts of data to archive such as from a RAID, this is probably your best choice.

My personal Power Computing system has four hard drives and a CD-R set up as follows:

SCSI bus 0 - built in SCSI port
ID: 0 - nothing
ID: 1 - 840 Meg external hard drive - used for system folder and data backup
ID: 2 - Compact Disk Recorder, 4xWrite - 12x Read
ID: 3 - CD-ROM Drive
ID: 4 - 730 Meg internal hard drive - used as startup and for applications
ID: 5 - 730 Meg internal hard drive - used as primary data storage
ID: 6 - Scanner

SCSI bus 1 - Ultra SCSI card
ID: 0 - 2 Gig internal hard drive - primarily for Photoshop scratch space
the rest of the bus is empty

Why all the hard drives? Well, the external hard drive came from my Apple ][gs. I got the two 730 Meg hard drives for $69 each. I just couldn't pass on the offer. I could have bought a larger drive, but I had enough SCSI ID's left and in the event of a failure, my system can easily keep working if any one of the four drives fail. Losing one out of three would be more problematic.


Software
With the above hardware you don't need to buy any additional software. The hardware listed above comes with the software you will need. By using the Finder to copy files to a second hard drive or zip drive is easy to do and retrieval of that data is just as easy.

Here is some free software that is very helpful:
Disk Copy - from Apple, allows the creation of mountable compressed disk volumes and archives
RevRDist - allows one to automatically put back missing files or backup data. Created by Purdue University, I should really send them a donation for this one.

Commercial software:
Retrospect - automated and fast backups
Norton - The last I looked at Norton it had a fastback utility

What to use:
The advantage of the free software is that one can easily access the backed up files without a specific software program. It can be a pain to access a single file when your system is completely dead and you need to install a program to access your data. It is easier to take your CD-R copy of data to a friends house and access data that way. No special hardware or software is required to access your data. RevRDist is quite powerful, and thus is fairly complex. One must write configuration files using sets of command codes. It was designed to maintain a lab full of computers, but can be used to back up data and restore accidentally deleted files on a personal system. One of my goals of this site is to provide some preset solutions using this program.

The advantage of programs like Retrospect is that one can compress archived data to conserve space and the program can keep copies of files as they change over time, automatically. Let's say you made a change to a file a couple of weeks ago that is now causing a problem. Retrospect will allow you to find a copy of that file in your archive that predates the problem change. Very handy. Retrospect is also user friendly as compared to RevRDist.

Norton Utilities is also a very useful program to own. You can get away with not using this program if you have proper backup techniques. If a hard drive is unfixable by Disk First Aid and you have everything backed up, you can reformat your hard drive and then copy everything back. This fixes the problem and optimizes the drive to a certain extent. I used this technique successfully on my Apple II for years.


How I do it
I could just tell you what to do, but I think its better to explain what I do personally.

1. I use disk copy to create compressed read-only volumes to conserve space and prevent problems with application folders.
2. I have bootable system folders on more than one hard drive.
3. I have CD-R copies of my system setup.
4. I backup important data to a second hard drive and offload it to a CD-R disk when I have accumulated 650 megs of data.
5. If you have kids (I don't), get them their own computer to mess up.

Let us assume we are setting up a new system, you have done a clean install and you are getting ready to install the software you want to use.

1. Disk Copy - One of my favorite programs!
To make my life easier, I created several Disk Copy compressed read only volumes of my applications. This prevents accidental changes or deletions to your software installation. It also prevents the accumulation of various data files within your application folders. It also allows one to put about twice as many applications in a given amount of space.

These programs can be used from a compressed disk:
Adobe Acrobat 3.0
Civilization II
Clarisworks 4.0
Internet Explorer 3.0 or 4.0
MacWrite Pro 1.5
Netscape 3.0 or 4.0x
Norton Utilities
Pagemaker 6.5
Pagespinner
ResEdit
Stuffit
Wordperfect

These programs can not be used from a compressed disk:
Adobe Pagemill

These programs can be partially used from a compressed disk:
Adobe After Effects
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Photoshop
Microsoft Office 4.2

If a program has a plugin folder, such as Photoshop, you may wish to leave the program uncompressed, but you could place the plugin folder on a writeable drive and rest of the program in a compressed drive and specify the plug-in folder location in the preferences of the program. I was able to do this with Photoshop 4.0 and Illustrator 7.0 without much difficulty.

Microsoft Office 4.2 in part can also be placed on a compressed volume, but this requires modification of the Word Preferences using ResEdit. One has to replace the numeric codes with full path and filenames for Word to find its components properly. Furthermore, Microsoft Office needs to be installed onto a writeable Disk Copy volume directly because Powerpoint settings are determined during the installation. After installation, the writeable disk copy volume may be converted to a compressed read-only volume. I did this procedure at work, but did not bother for home. I suspect that Office 98 may run better in a compressed volume.

The best way to setup a compressed volume is to first make a writeable volume of the approximate size you will need. If you drag and drop a folder containing a single file onto the disk copy program, you can create a custom size disk image. Once you have this writeable disk image created, install software on it just as you would any other hard drive. Once complete, you can convert the disk image to a read-only compressed volume. You should backup this disk image file to a Zip disk, CD-R etc. Create a disk images folder on your hard drive and move the disk image file to this folder. Make an alias to the disk image and move the alias to the startup items of your system folder. Now when you start your computer, the image will be mounted automatically. Moreover, the disk image is put through an integrity check, so you will know if there is ever a reason to replace the disk image file.


2. Creating a bootable second hard drive.
In step one, we installed all of our software. So now the system folder should contain all the extensions and preferences we need for our system to work properly. If your system appears to be working properly, make a copy of the system folder on your second hard drive by dragging the system folder to the other hard drive. You are simply performing a massive copy. Whenever you wish to boot from the second hard drive, you can use the startup disk control panel to select the boot disk or use [command] [option] [shift] [delete] to start from an external hard drive. You can easily replace any damaged files on the first hard drive when you have booted from the second.


3. Backup your entire system and Application setup (including disk images) to CD-R.
If you don't have a CD-R make a compressed read-only Disk Copy image of everything and put it on your second hard drive. This way you can be certain that your archive is unchanged over time. This will require a lot of space and time to do the compression. Start the compression before you go to sleep so you don't waste time. I also suspect that you have a friend that has a CD-R that you could persuade to burn one or two CD's for you. Bribery of food and drink gets that friend over even sooner. At the least, buy a pack of CD-R disks for $15 and give your friend the CD-R's you don't use.


4. Ongoing data backup.
Does that friend need to return, or have you decided to buy that zip drive, jaz drive, or CD-R yourself? Persuading your friend to come back will buy you a few more months. Just make sure you have at least two copies of all important data. I maintain two copies of my data with a customized setup of RevRDist that copies changes to my 730 Meg data volume to a writeable Disk Copy image on my 2 Gig hard drive. RevRDist automatically copies files over when the system is shut down. For Photoshop scratch space, I have over a gigabyte on the 2 Gig drive and in a crunch I can also use my 840 Meg external hard drive for additional scratch space.


5. If you have kids (I don't), get them their own computer to mess up.
You do not want them installing games on your computer all the time. Besides, if you have kids, one computer is likely not to be enough. Those iMacs are are soon to be less than $1000. Small price to pay to keep them from messing with your computer. Keep in mind, if the kids computer is not nearly as good as yours, they will use your computer anyway. So don't buy the kids some used junk! If the kids want a Windows computer, set up a Mac with Virtual PC that boots into Windows on startup automatically. Windows doesn't run as fast on a Mac, but you can duplicate the hard drive file to back up the Windows PC on the Mac. No more reinstalling on Windows either.

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