Is Time Machine Enough?

My MacBook's hard drive died back in December 2006. And, my first generation Mac mini (the old G4 model) decided to give it up around August of 2007. Since Leopard didn't arrive until October 2007, neither of these incidents could take advantage of Leopard's Time Machine.

Since then, I've actually had to use Time Machine twice to recover files that weren't backed up elsewhere. And, I tested a full restore on my MacBook by wiping out the drive (on purpose) and then restoring from a Time Machine backup. This is not enough testing to fully trust the process. On the other hand, Time Machine is batting 100% so far. My iMac and MacBook each have their own external drives dedicated to Time Machine backups. And, each one also has a second different external drive that I use to manually backup files.

One thing I realized I had not done since my Mac mini died was prepare a bootable external drive for my Intel-based Macs. So, I booted from the Leopard install DVD and built one. If you want to create a universal bootable external drive (Power PC or Intel), you can find information on this Apple support page:

Mac OS X 10.5: Creating and maintaining a bootable "universal" external disk

The next thing I did was check on the current state of image backups for OS X. This has not seemed to change since I took a look a few years ago.

Carbon Copy Cloner: It is fully functional shareware. The suggested donation on Mike Bombich's donate page is $10. It is compatible with Tiger and Leopard and supports incremental backups in addition to imaging.

SuperDuper!: Its availability is kind of interesting. There is a "lite" version (although it is not called that) which is free and provides drive cloning. If you register the software by paying $27.95, other features are enabled (including scripting).

Carbon Copy Cloner and SuperDuper! do more than just disk imaging. And, if I ever move beyond my simplistic (though functional for me) backup scheme, I would defintely spend more time looking at these two applications.

The final backup piece I took a look at were online options. I was not very happy with my ".Mac" service when I had it and did not renew it or buy into its successor MobileMe.

dotMac: I took a quick look at this Open Source response to ".Mac". It looks interesting and my concern has nothing to do with the project's technical aspects. My concern is that if I use it with my likely server target (my website's hosting service), I will exceed my bandwidth allotment simply by backing up my digital photos.

Jungle Disk is a $20 utility that uses the Amazon S3 Service (separate monthly recurring charges) for storage. There is also a Jungle Disk Plus Service that costs $1/month (per desktop) and provides additional services such as web-based access to files. Jungle Disk was recently acquired by Rackspace. The press release states that new and existing users will not see any changes. I've heard that enough times to adopt a wait-and-see attitude. And, I have some reservations about Amazon's S3 service stability.. That said, Jungle Disk + Amazon S3 seems like a reasonable way for an individual like me to implement offsite backups.

So, is Time Machine enough? It is probably a good starting point for most of us. I use it in combination with additional external drives and flash drives (for current work files) and burn multiple copies of DVDs for things like family photos and video clips. The hope is keeping a live migration of files (especially family photos) from one generation of external hard drives to the next as well as optical storage will help them survive over the years. So far, this has worked since I got my first digital camera in 1995 and started burning CDs, writing floppies, and copy files to new computers as they replaced old ones.

I generally don't mind reinstalling applications. So, restoring an image to become operational is not nearly as important as keeping two or more computers in running condition so one can be used while the other is restored. The move from client-side software to web services like Google Docs, Zoho Office Suite, and Evernote has also reduced the need for application installation for full operations. An Internet connection and web browser gets me to about 75% of operational readiness for daily work.