My Backup Strategy: A Quick Summary

Dr. Drang wrote and asked about backups. I have a simple 1-2-3 backup strategy:

1. Hourly backups to a Time Machine volume
2. Nightly backups to a SuperDuper! volume
3. Offsite backups to CrashPlan Central

In case either Time Machine or SuperDuper! will go nuts, I still have the warm and cozy feeling of having a second local backup. In case of a real catastrophe I can recover from the offsite backup. It took about a month to do the initial upload, but now everything is backed up. I started with the most important folders and incrementally added new ones in order of importance.

I also do the following, but it’s not part of my backup strategy and nothing I know I can rely on. It’s only for the worst of all cases and sometimes a convenience for recovery of working files:

1. Daily backup of Address Book, Application preferences, iCal, iTunes playlists, Keychain and Safari settings with Apple’s Backup application to the iDisk (which I don’t use at all).
2. A lot of stuff under 1. and even more is already in the cloud thanks to MobileMe sync.
3. I have a secure sparse bundle that holds my DEVONthink database. I sync the sparse bundle once every couple of weeks to one of our servers with Unison.
4. Text files, my VoodooPad database and other “working files” are on my Dropbox; I don’t consider this a real backup, but in the worst case it could rescue my data.