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.