How Do You Back Up Your MacBook?
marcsiry said:
ridski said:You assume incorrectly, assuming you're using Macs and Time Machine. Just designate the same drive as your backup for each machine in turn and it will create separate backup folders. It will also run out of space much more quickly, depending on the size disparity between the backups and your external drive
I'm going to assume that you can't back up more than one machine to the same external hard drive, yes?
That's because it stores versions and doesn't just overwrite the last version, right?
marcsiry said:
ridski said:You assume incorrectly, assuming you're using Macs and Time Machine. Just designate the same drive as your backup for each machine in turn and it will create separate backup folders. It will also run out of space much more quickly, depending on the size disparity between the backups and your external drive
I'm going to assume that you can't back up more than one machine to the same external hard drive, yes?
Even if you are using a Mac and Time Machine, you can just partition the drive and then run Time Machine from 2 machines onto one drive (assuming it is large enough). It will look as though you have 2 separate drives attached once it is partitioned. I've done this without issue with a MacBook and MacBook Pro.
ridski said:
marcsiry said:That's because it stores versions and doesn't just overwrite the last version, right?
ridski said:You assume incorrectly, assuming you're using Macs and Time Machine. Just designate the same drive as your backup for each machine in turn and it will create separate backup folders. It will also run out of space much more quickly, depending on the size disparity between the backups and your external drive
I'm going to assume that you can't back up more than one machine to the same external hard drive, yes?
No, because it uses different folders for different machines. But you don't need to know that. Time Machine is really smart. It lets you think less. I've had to teach myself to think less when using Apple products. It was hard at first.
Yike! This thread has gone way over my head now, but I like it. I'm glad I started it, because it is a ton of really great information for others, as well as me.
Our needs are small, so we ended up going with a 1-Terabyte Seagate external drive, and I'll back up manually once a week or so. It took about two hours to do the first back-up, and it should be easy-peasy quick-and-breezy from now on.
The guy at the Apple store couldn't have been more helpful or nicer. Apparently, our laptop is just old enough that Time Capsule might not have been the best fit, which is kinda ridiculous, but the Seagate should work perfectly for our needs. And our laptop doesn't even hold a Terabyte, so one is enough.
Today, we are off to the Verizon store to upgrade our phones. Yes, I know the newest iPhone just came out, but I can wait a couple of years for that. For now, the iPhone 6 Plus is where I'm headed.
Peggy-- This article may be of interest RE your visit to the Verizon store: http://www.verizonwireless.com/news/article/2015/08/simplified-data-choices-match-customer-lifestyles.html
Of course, when dealing with Verizon, nothing is ever as "simple" as it appears!
PeggyC said:
Thanks, Unicorn33. I'm all about the simplified choices these days.
PeggyC, when you say back up manually, what do you mean? You're using Time Machine, right? That's an app on your computer. If so, next time you connect the drive to your computer, Time Machine will do its thing without needing you to do anything but leave the drive connected. When the backup is done, eject the drive by pressing the little up-pointing arrow icon.
Tom_Reingold said:
PeggyC, when you say back up manually, what do you mean? You're using Time Machine, right? That's an app on your computer. If so, next time you connect the drive to your computer, Time Machine will do its thing without needing you to do anything but leave the drive connected. When the backup is done, eject the drive by pressing the little up-pointing arrow icon.
I just did a fresh backup because we got new iPhones today and I transferred all my photos from my iPhone to my laptop, then started Time Machine. How do I know when it's done? It looked totally different from how the first backup looked. And it never notified me that it was done, but the eject button appeared on the Seagate drive in the Finder. Very puzzling... I ejected, and I hope that was the right thing to do. I would hate to lose all those photos if something happens to the laptop now.
Tom's the expert, but from my (limited) experience: I watch the spinning symbol in the Finder while the backup is underway. Once it stops, I've concluded the backup is done and press the symbol to eject.
PeggyC said:
Tom_Reingold said:I just did a fresh backup because we got new iPhones today and I transferred all my photos from my iPhone to my laptop, then started Time Machine. How do I know when it's done? It looked totally different from how the first backup looked. And it never notified me that it was done, but the eject button appeared on the Seagate drive in the Finder. Very puzzling... I ejected, and I hope that was the right thing to do. I would hate to lose all those photos if something happens to the laptop now.
PeggyC, when you say back up manually, what do you mean? You're using Time Machine, right? That's an app on your computer. If so, next time you connect the drive to your computer, Time Machine will do its thing without needing you to do anything but leave the drive connected. When the backup is done, eject the drive by pressing the little up-pointing arrow icon.
That is pretty much what I did, although the screen did things I had never seen before, which always makes me nervous. Still, I suppose it's done. I'll back up again next week and see if it seems to be going the right way.
My screen doesn't seem to change at all. If it wasn't for the spinning, I wouldn't even know.
(Actually, that's not entirely true. There is a little light on the external drive itself that blinks while in use. When it stops blinking (or the blinking occurs at regular intervals), it's done working. Also, if I recall correctly, there is a tiny black Time Machine symbol at the top of the screen that subtly changes when a backup is in progress. ...And I've now totally exhausted my knowledge of Apple backups.)
unicorn33 said:
My screen doesn't seem to change at all. If it wasn't for the spinning, I wouldn't even know.
(Actually, that's not entirely true. There is a little light on the external drive itself that blinks while in use. When it stops blinking (or the blinking occurs at regular intervals), it's done working. Also, if I recall correctly, there is a tiny black Time Machine symbol at the top of the screen that subtly changes when a backup is in progress. ...And I've now totally exhausted my knowledge of Apple backups.)
Ahhh. Good things to watch for. Thanks!
The spinning arrow in the menu bar might be all you need. It will spin at some points. If you see it spin and then later see it not spinning, then a backup is complete. If you want more information, open System Preferences and then Time Machine. It will give you some status, such as time of last backup and time of next backup. If a backup is in progress, it will show that along with what stage it is at.
I'm not sure if it's because of a setting I've inadvertently checked (or unchecked) or if, perhaps, it differs from one OS to another, but I no longer have the spinning arrow on the menu bar. I'm not sure when it went away, but for quite some time now I have to actually click on the little Time Machine icon in the menu bar to see if there's a backup in progress.
Doesn't really matter very much for my purposes, as I rarely unplug the drive anyway -- I use my iPad and iPhone for almost all my computing needs. (Hence my ignorance of exactly when the change happened.) I'm just posting as a data point, in case other readers also may not see the spinning icon.
If you click on the Time Machine icon near the clock you can select 'Open Time Machine Preferences...' and the screen that you get will display the progress in what I think should be pretty easy to understand.
I have had some minor issues with Time Machine getting a little bogged down when managing the space for two backups on one (non partitioned) hard drive once the drive gets full and it needs to start pruning backups. As a result I've switched to just using one drive per computer, as drives are cheap enough.
The biggest caveats with hard drive backups, don't store them in the same place as your computer. If someone steals your computer they will likely steal the drive with it.
As far as ridski's question about storing data somewhere that isn't on your computer, you can use something like Google Drive, Dropbox, etc and just don't sync it with your computer - those sync tools can cause some problems and potential confusion as well. Most instances of someone accidentally losing a lot of data from Dropbox has been because they did something on their local computer deleting a lot of data and it synced and they didn't notice in time to be able to recover.
I actually don't 'really' have a computer anymore. I had been at a point where I only used a computer at home to download my photos and sync my music with iTunes. I ended up moving to both Google Photos (unlimited storage as long as your happy with it potentially reprocessing your photos) and Google Play Music (free storage for 50,000 songs as long as you're happy with it potentially using a matched mp3 for music it already has). My 'files' have been in Google Drive for a few years. The storage there isn't strictly 'backed up', but the storage is resilient and not known to have any failures. If I really cared, I would find a way to backup Google Drive to something else - Amazon S3 is probably what I would choose and the easiest way for that to happen would be to use Google Apps instead of vanilla google and get a service like backupify (this is what happens for our important accounts at the office). Fortunately, while I like my data and don't want to lose it, most of what I would be really really upset to have lost would have made it to other people in email, or was posted on Facebook, etc. so I'm not really interested in bringing that complexity into my private life... it's too much like work!
I can certainly say that horror stories about people I know losing stuff they've had on cloud storage are pretty much nonexistent, but with 100 employees I get at least a few a year who have a bunch of important stuff sitting on a hard drive at home that ends up being dead when they plug it in. So while people are scared of cloud storage services, problems with it don't really happen in practice, while problems with hard drives happen all the time.
As far as marcsiry's set up, one thing to be wary with regard to Amazon Glacier is that their restore charges are clear as mud. As it stands, if you need to get data back quickly you will be gouged for the restore. If you want the data back in a sensible way you need to restore it slowly. AWS stuff is not designed for consumers, so there are many easy ways to accidentally spend a lot of money. (We use S3 as the back-end storage for the Cloud Storage Gateway that I replaced our file server with at work, fun stuff!) I always recommend people use S3 instead of Glacier since the price drop only made it 3 cents versus 1 cent (it had been 11 cents versus 1 cent prior to the drop). It's worth the money to not have to read the articles necessary to understand Glacier's restore charges! I haven't looked into Google's Nearline since it existed. I do archive old user data (stuff that realistically is never accessed, but we don't feel comfortable deleting) in Glacier, and since we have other stuff in AWS it's not worth looking to migrate.
Right, do not confuse Dropbox and other sync'ing services with backups. Syncing and backups are different concepts.
You need redundant storage because of accidental deletion, accidental modifications, malicious tampering, hardware failures, fire, flood, and theft. Thinking about it, storage services such as Google Drive could be sufficient for reasons qrysdonnell cites, but you should know how to retrieve things you accidentally modify or delete.
I've had @Tom_Reingold help me out a number of times setting up my backups. Seriously, if you don't have the time or knowledge for what to do (I am pretty tech savvy but he is much more) it really pays to have him set it all up for you. Every time I get a message that something wasn't backed up (Crashplan) or what not I thank him in my mind. That said, I do need to do some file exchanges/copies with those old 8mm and movies...like soon. Do you all just go to Costco or the Millburn place? I just hate putting my stuff in a box and shipping it out...
"If you click on the Time Machine icon near the clock you can select
'Open Time Machine Preferences...' and the screen that you get will
display the progress in what I think should be pretty easy to
understand."
Thanks!
And the whole discussion of cloud storage, synching and back-ups is over my head, I'm afraid. I don't know a darn thing about any of that, so my brain just went "Whaaaaaaaaaaaat?!?" and crashed.
Starsong, I live in CT now, so getting Tom to help in person isn't possible any more. 
To say that with less hyperbole, I don't understand cloud storage options at all and find them very intimidating. I wouldn't know where to begin to compare the features and inner workings of those systems.
I now have a full time position at Manhattan College (in the Bronx) so I don't do consulting any more. Thanks for the boost anyway, Starsong.
PeggyC, can you be more specific about where your head reboots? The cloud is, as its name implies, a place where you don't see or understand what happens but it happens anyway. Your files go onto a hard drive or a bunch of hard drives in some room or some rooms somewhere on the planet. Through the power of economy of scale, cloud services are generally more robust than anything you can do yourself. There are industrial strength electricity, air conditioning, cybersecurity, physical security (locked doors and walls), and personnel procedures, making the service more likely to keep stuff safe from fires, floods, electrical surges, and physical and cyber theft. The way it works is you install an app on your computer and sign up with the service. The app wakes up at times and figures out which files to send to the other half of the app which is in the cloud. It's similar to your browser connecting to, say, amazon.com and then displaying the page. When you go to amazon.com and enter your credit card information, that is called uploading, because you're sending from "down here" to "up there." In the case of cloud backups, you are uploading copies of your files rather than your credit card number. The uploading happens "in the background," i.e. without your initiating the process. It happens while you edit your Word doc or read MOL or whatever. The app doesn't ask you to back up your files, and generally, it doesn't tell you it's doing it. It just does it. Not initiating the backup is a wonderful thing, because you don't have to remember to do it!
All that can give you a warm fuzzy feeling, which is 98% justified. It's still a very good idea to check to see if things are doing what you think they should be doing. Also, I like to crank up the warning level. I do that by telling the app to warn me if a backup hasn't occurred in one day. I think the default is three or five days. It works because the service in the cloud -- not my computer -- notices that my computer hasn't uploaded anything. So I might be on vacation and have turned my computer off. There are no need for backups in that case, but the service in the cloud has no idea I'm on vacation. This is a good thing.
Does this help?
Tom, All of that I understand. It's when people start comparing one system to another and throwing around jargon and names of specific products or systems I know nothing about that I get confused. E.g., qrysdonnell's latest post might as well have been in Mandarin for all I got out of it. I know that's my ignorance, but it is frustrating.
qrysdonnell said:
If you click on the Time Machine icon near the clock you can select 'Open Time Machine Preferences...' and the screen that you get will display the progress in what I think should be pretty easy to understand.
I have had some minor issues with Time Machine getting a little bogged down when managing the space for two backups on one (non partitioned) hard drive once the drive gets full and it needs to start pruning backups. As a result I've switched to just using one drive per computer, as drives are cheap enough.
The biggest caveats with hard drive backups, don't store them in the same place as your computer. If someone steals your computer they will likely steal the drive with it.
As far as ridski's question about storing data somewhere that isn't on your computer, you can use something like Google Drive, Dropbox, etc and just don't sync it with your computer - those sync tools can cause some problems and potential confusion as well. Most instances of someone accidentally losing a lot of data from Dropbox has been because they did something on their local computer deleting a lot of data and it synced and they didn't notice in time to be able to recover.
I actually don't 'really' have a computer anymore. I had been at a point where I only used a computer at home to download my photos and sync my music with iTunes. I ended up moving to both Google Photos (unlimited storage as long as your happy with it potentially reprocessing your photos) and Google Play Music (free storage for 50,000 songs as long as you're happy with it potentially using a matched mp3 for music it already has). My 'files' have been in Google Drive for a few years. The storage there isn't strictly 'backed up', but the storage is resilient and not known to have any failures. If I really cared, I would find a way to backup Google Drive to something else - Amazon S3 is probably what I would choose and the easiest way for that to happen would be to use Google Apps instead of vanilla google and get a service like backupify (this is what happens for our important accounts at the office). Fortunately, while I like my data and don't want to lose it, most of what I would be really really upset to have lost would have made it to other people in email, or was posted on Facebook, etc. so I'm not really interested in bringing that complexity into my private life... it's too much like work!
I can certainly say that horror stories about people I know losing stuff they've had on cloud storage are pretty much nonexistent, but with 100 employees I get at least a few a year who have a bunch of important stuff sitting on a hard drive at home that ends up being dead when they plug it in. So while people are scared of cloud storage services, problems with it don't really happen in practice, while problems with hard drives happen all the time.
As far as marcsiry's set up, one thing to be wary with regard to Amazon Glacier is that their restore charges are clear as mud. As it stands, if you need to get data back quickly you will be gouged for the restore. If you want the data back in a sensible way you need to restore it slowly. AWS stuff is not designed for consumers, so there are many easy ways to accidentally spend a lot of money. (We use S3 as the back-end storage for the Cloud Storage Gateway that I replaced our file server with at work, fun stuff!) I always recommend people use S3 instead of Glacier since the price drop only made it 3 cents versus 1 cent (it had been 11 cents versus 1 cent prior to the drop). It's worth the money to not have to read the articles necessary to understand Glacier's restore charges! I haven't looked into Google's Nearline since it existed. I do archive old user data (stuff that realistically is never accessed, but we don't feel comfortable deleting) in Glacier, and since we have other stuff in AWS it's not worth looking to migrate.
I actually gave up on the thought. I realized a large portion of what was filling my hard drive was music and videos. Most of the music I still have on CD and I listen almost exclusively to Spotify anyway. The videos I don't need or can digitize again at another time. So I deleted those and freed up about half my drive space.
ridski said:
I actually gave up on the thought. I realized a large portion of what was filling my hard drive was music and videos. Most of the music I still have on CD and I listen almost exclusively to Spotify anyway. The videos I don't need or can digitize again at another time. So I deleted those and freed up about half my drive space.
For music you can always set up Google Play Music, which has a free music locker (up to 50,000 songs - but that's a lot). Once there you can delete them from any local storage. There's an iOS app so you can download music to your phone, and a web page so you can listen to music wherever you can get web access.
Can you back up your ITunes library to Google Play Music, or is that mixing up two different systems? (Sorry if this is a dumb question.)
qrysdonnell said:
ridski said:For music you can always set up Google Play Music, which has a free music locker (up to 50,000 songs - but that's a lot). Once there you can delete them from any local storage. There's an iOS app so you can download music to your phone, and a web page so you can listen to music wherever you can get web access.
I actually gave up on the thought. I realized a large portion of what was filling my hard drive was music and videos. Most of the music I still have on CD and I listen almost exclusively to Spotify anyway. The videos I don't need or can digitize again at another time. So I deleted those and freed up about half my drive space.
PeggyC said:
Tom, All of that I understand. It's when people start comparing one system to another and throwing around jargon and names of specific products or systems I know nothing about that I get confused. E.g., qrysdonnell's latest post might as well have been in Mandarin for all I got out of it. I know that's my ignorance, but it is frustrating.
Sorry about the gibberish, I was really responding to a bunch of other people that had commented later and had brought up other topics!
As far as your query, here's what I'd do:
1. Get a Carbonite Basic plan (it's what you're limited to with a Mac). It's about $50 a year. That will take care of offsite backup, which you need in case your stuff gets stolen or house burns down, etc.
2. Buy this hard drive: http://goo.gl/h9m1EA and use it with the Time Machine feature built into OSX. When you plug the hard drive in it should prompt you if you want to use it for Time Machine. Just say yes and you're off the the races. You want this because in the case of hardware failure, you'll be able to get on with your life much more quickly than you would waiting for everything to download.
3. Check on Carbonite and Time Machine every once in a while (if you're on a laptop you'll have to connect the drive periodically for TM) and you're golden.
If you don't like your stuff in the cloud? It sounds harsh, but I'd say just get over it. The important stuff is probably already 'elsewhere', and at much more interesting targets that are much more likely to be breached. (Sometimes that target is literally Target!)
And what about a network-based backup? Time Machine over a network is really slow. This leads to two problems. First, sometimes people never get their first backup completed. Second, if you have to do a restore it can take forever. (I once did a restore of a computer over a Time Capsule that took 20 hours. Should it have taken that long? Who knows, it did and it was annoying!) For people with more interest in technology they might be interested in trying to work out or around (or ignore) these things, but in your situation I'd recommend keeping everything simple. Now, this does add a regular 'manual task', but Macs have gotten good about bugging you if you haven't backed up in a while. Also, if you have both Carbonite and Time Machine in place then even if your TM backup is a little behind you'd at least be able to get your recent changes through Carbonite.
I would certainly act on it soon! Data is never safe in only one place. Hard drives dying are not a terribly rare occurrence, so anything of import on one should definitely be somewhere else.
Hope that helps!
unicorn33 said:
Can you back up your ITunes library to Google Play Music, or is that mixing up two different systems? (Sorry if this is a dumb question.)
Yep. That's the easiest way to get the music in there. I migrated my iTunes library into it and then have been manually adding new music through the web page and am not using iTunes for anything anymore. Liberation!
Now, anything purchased from Apple won't import, but that's 'the price you pay' for giving them your money. I've never purchased any music with DRM, so I didn't have any problems there. I suspect many Apple users aren't so lucky.
Like Tom, I do multiple, logically and physically separate backups, but I go a little far with it. Call it belt, suspenders, and an extra pair of pants underneath.
All my computers are backed up to a local, highly redundant network RAID (Synology) via Time Machine.
My main computer is also backed up to a second, FireWire connected RAID hard drive (forget which brand). I swap out this hard drive every two years whether I need to or not, and keep the spares in a different location (office in another city).
My working files on all those computers live in a folder that is continually synced with Dropbox.
My "precious files" (photos mostly) are also backed up on an hourly basis to Amazon Glacier, a long term, cold storage solution.
I plan to soon start backing my Synology network RAID in its entirety to the Google version of Glacier, so I can have cloud service redundancy in case they or Amazon go under/get hacked/have a catastrophic data destroying bug.
This may sound like crazy overkill, but paradoxically, once set up it actually reduces the amount of work (and stress) around data security. Much like having multiple sets of reading glasses all over the house, car and office, I don't have to think very hard about where to find something when I need it- it's all within easy reach.
This was recently tested when my wife's long term canine companion, and a treasured member of our family, passed away. She wanted to find photos of the dog that predated my relationship with her- they had been on a desktop PC she owned when I moved in.
It took a few hours, but I found them on a backup of a laptop of mine from that era, that was itself backed up to another, later laptop, and then backed up to my RAID. The biggest issue was that they were not labeled with distinctive names or metadata, so I had to hunt down by general date and visually inspect the photos.
That leads me to my next big thing- the new Google Photos service will not only backup all your photos, but it will run image recognition on them. I could have simply searched on "dog" to return images of our pet in the archives.
Google Photos stores downsampled versions of large photos, so it's not a viable primary solution for me, but if it works it can be an excellent browseable archive for quick access, and help me find the higher quality versions in my own archive when necessary.
That will be a project for some future weekend. Hope someone found this exhaustive post useful.