I’ve been very lucky over the years and have only had one hard drive crash. That time didn’t matter because it was on an older system that didn’t have anything important on it. Now, I live off of my MacBook and iPhone for school, work, and personal life so I take backing up my data very seriously. I’m so paranoid that I could probably be back up and running like nothing happened within an hour or two (and that includes buying another MacBook and iPhone). Here’s how I stay on top of my precious personal data:

  1. Mac OS X’s Time Machine

    I use Time Machine with a 500GB Apple Time Capsule. It automatically backs up all of my data for my entire computer. I can go back and get files I may have deleted by accident or get a different version of a file. It’s just as easy as the videos make it look! The Time Capsule is nothing more than a wireless router with a hard drive inside, but using all Apple products completely streamlines the process.

  2. External Hard Drives

    I currently have 4 external hard drives.

    My newest 1TB drive stores everything. I mirror its contents on the DriveZilla. I backup my iTunes Library drive to the 1TB drives and also have copies of my Flip footage on them as well. I’ve decided to put more trust in my bigger 1TB drives since I don’t travel with them like I do with my smaller Passport drives.

  3. Déjà Vu

    In order to keep a copy of my iTunes Library on my 1TB drive, I could periodically copy and paste everything on the drive, but that’s archaic and would take too long because most of the time would be spent copying over files that haven’t changed. This is the essential thinking behind the Time Machine feature. I exclude my iTunes Library in my Time Machine backups so that my Time Capsule can fill up with more important documents.

    This is where Déjà Vu comes to the rescue. I can easily tell it to copy everything from my iTunes Library drive to a folder on my 1TB drive and it’ll check to see if new files need to be written or if old files need to be updated. You can schedule Déjà Vu to run daily, weekly, or monthly but I just do it manually whenever I feel like it’s been awhile. The limitation in using all of these external drives is that you need all of them to be plugged in, turned on, and mounted before starting any of these backup processes or they will fail.

  4. DVDs

    The last line of defense and the safest bet is hard disc media like DVDs. When I accumulate 4GB of new music, I burn the files to a DVD in case my iTunes library or drive ever becomes corrupted. If I have to start from square one, I can import DVD after DVD of music. I also burn important software to DVD that I may have downloaded (legally of course). If I need to reinstall something like Microsoft Office or Adobe Creative Suite, I can grab the DVD a lot quicker than I can re-download multiple gigabytes of install files.

    I also have a growing collection of unix distribution CDs and DVDs that have come in handy. Just the other week my roommate was downloading gOS to install on one of his parent’s PCs and my archives saved him some time.

    downloading gOS to put on the parents PC and finally end the constant nagging about Windows (tweet)

    @llobster I have the ISO on my shared drive and it’s prolly on a disc around here somewhere (tweet)

This configuration allows me to sleep easy at night because I know my entire laptop is backed up, my entire iTunes Library is backed up, and most of my other media is mirrored as well. Something is missing… my iPhone! Where is my iPhone backed up to? Every time I sync it I see it says it’s backing itself up. Everything should be ok right?

In reality, my iPhone is just being backed up to my laptop but that backup is being ignored by my Time Machine backup by default. Luckily, the smart guys over at TUAW have laid out an easy way to hack this default so that your iPhone backups are included with Time Machine. With that in place, NOW I can rest easy and feel properly prepared for when something inevitably happens to one of my drives.