These days I’m working exclusively from a laptop computer — an Apple MacBook — which I transport daily between my home and my office. Each night, my MacBook mounts and backs up my home directory to a 500GB drive served from my home server, a Mac mini. The mini later mirrors this 500GB drive to another 500GB drive, and archives any changed or deleted files to a third (120 GB drive). This mirroring/archiving type backup system has served me well for years. (Knock on virtual wood here…)
But what happens if my MacBook gets damaged in the trip from work to home? (I do ride a scooter.) To address this, I’m experimenting with a new workflow:
1. I have a Finder Smart Folder, “Current Backups”, configured to include all files located in both my Documents folder, and my Desktop folder, and which have been modified “Today”.
2. Interarchy 8.1 now supports access to Amazon’s incredible new S3 online storage service. So I used Interarchy to create an upload “dropplet” which automatically sends dropped files to a “Current Backups” area I created on Amazon.
3. At the end of the day, I look at the file list in the “Current Backups” Smart Folder, choose the files I want to backup, drag them to the Interarchy “dropplet” and wait for them to get uploaded. Once done, I close the MacBook and head home.
So far, this seems to work fairly well.
Matt,
That sounds like a nifty system. Can you describe or provide more info on the Mac mini + 2 500 GB drives. I am thiking about trying a similar approach. Any tips on drive purcahse or setup for best results?
Thanks,
James
Hmm… I’ve yet to replace my off-site backup system since .Mac Backup let me down after a drive failure. I rotate a full mirror off site occasionally, but that’s every few days at best. I still need something that does that .Mac Backup claimed to do: back up key files to off-site automatically and at least daily.
I used Interarchy from the earliest releases (it was called Anarchie in those days), but abandoned it as the UI became more and more insane. With a service like StrongSpace I can use trusty, old rsync to back up my files. That’s easy to set up and reliable.
However, S3 looks like it would be much cheaper, even with transfer fees.
Decisions, decisions…
–mkb
PS: You mentioned a while back that you were cooking up a comparison of SynchronizeX Pro and ChronoSync. Is that still in the works?
please tell me how to set up jungle so it automatically schedules an upload of specified data to amazon s3. i have no idea.
I realize this is a bit late, but.. that does sound like a nice backup/archiving setup you have going, if you have the time to describe it in more detail that would be very helpful. Thanks!