My Backups

I’m a writer. I hate losing text! So, I have several methods all running concurrently.

(1) I run Retrospect to DVD on an old Mac which backups five Macs and one Windows laptop. It runs daily.

(2) I use Deja Vu to backup my home account on my laptop to my iPod on demand. Usually I do this daily to weekly depending on my current project.

(3) I make snapshot CD images of my working directory when preparing for a trip. I give these to my parents who live 500 miles away.

(4) I have written a Perl script that runs hourly under cron. It visits my working directories and makes a 50-60 MB copy of those files which are Most Recently Touched. This MRT archive is then mirrored, using psync (installed by Deja Vu) onto my .Mac partition. The OS then mirrors this archive to the Apple Servers, and then back to the home machine running Retrospect. So even on the road, my home Retrospect backups are picking up any changes I make.

So at any given time, my current project will be mirrored over several computers, off-site on Apple’s servers, manually burned to CDROM, backed up to DVD by Retrospect, and copied to my iPod.

The interesting thing is that I don’t feel that this is at all excessive.