Despite never having lost any significant data in a computer crash or disk failure, I’m well aware of the importance of backup. I have thousands of photos stored on my computer, and only a handful printed. While the cloud is great for storing email and a few important documents, living in New Zealand and having a 30GB limit on our internet connection means it is no good for backing up multimedia or large files. Earlier in the year after getting married and moving into our own (rented) house I decided it was a good time to come up with a robust backup solution.
My wife has a MacBook Pro and I use an iMac, of course the natural (and probably ideal) backup system would be to buy a Time Capsule and have them both backing up to that, plus a portable USB drive for archiving that offsite. But, I already have a nice Firewire 800 external hard drive for backup, and Time Capsules aren’t that cheap.
Also, I thought it would be quite nice to come up with a way to synchronize Rebekah’s user account between the MacBook and iMac so if she wanted to use the iMac she could access all her stuff as if on her laptop. This too would mean we would only need to worry about backing up the iMac.
iMac Backup
For this I am using the built in Time Machine with my external 1TB hard drive. Has been working great for me since I set it up and gives easy historical backups.
MacBook – iMac Sync
After reading reviews I quickly settled on buying ChronoSync and ChronoAgent for a total of $50 USD. The setup wasn’t particularly simple, but within a couple of hours I had it all setup nicely. ChronoSync on the iMac with Agent on the laptop. Every time ChronoSync connects to the network it synchronises her Documents, Photos and Desktop folders (I chose not to sync the whole profile so that she could have different preferences etc on the laptop to the desktop). Because Time Machine is running on my iMac, all her stuff has a historical backup on my external drive.
Offsite Backup
No backup solution is worth much without an offsite backup, and they are a bit annoying so need to be simple.
Using ChronoSync I have setup a job which automatically synchronizes my iMac to a Portable USB 500GB drive whenever I connect it (about once a month).
To keep things simple and make it easy to remember I keep this in my car, because I figure if the iMac got stolen it would probably be when we aren’t there and have the car with us. I actually have 2 of these drives and rotate them between work and the car just because I had the drives spare and it makes it really robust.
Summay
So there you have it, a relatively simple solution to keep the MacBook synchronized with the iMac, a historical onsite backup and a simple offsite backup. I haven’t had to touch it since setting it up except to plug in the offsite backup drives.
My solution would be very different for Windows, perhaps I’ll talk about that at a later date.
Equipment Used
- 1x External hard drive for Time Machine backup
- ChronoSync & ChronoAgent for laptop sync
- 1 or 2 portable USB drives for offsite backup
