My hard drive had a heart attack and popped off last week. (It was a 2011 iMac) As I have been busy the last 2weeks traveling for work, my last back up missed 2weeks of important work which I had to rewrite… I always backed up manually, and now see the need for something that happens automatically for me and my wife, and soon the kids will be asking. So… how do you dads go about it as a household? With multiple macs. I‘d very much love to hear your suggestions and experience with different backup solutions.
And the no.2 question is … which MacBook, iMac, Macmini ? I need a Desktop Solution, but it could also be a MacBook wired to a monitor which would also cover me for traveling (I do like my iPad for that though)
Thanks guys
All the machines in my house (around eight or so) have two externals attached: One for Time Machine, in case of accidental file over-write etc. And one for a clone of the HDD using Superduper, which automatically clones the hard drive overnight, everynight.
My main work machines use SSD’s for the local cloning, which SuperDuper makes into a bootable disc after exach backup so if a drive fails I can just boot from it and go. It also clones itself “in the cloud” in case of a house fire etc.
Oh, and everything stores all work files on Dropbox, so that’s another type of backup.
Barring a nuclear attack, I can be up and running again in an hour or so in the event of a of a catastrophic failure.
I’m a bit OTT regards backups it’s fair to say. But sooner be OTT than lose stuff.
Time Machine and Carbon Copy Cloner
iMac and MBP:
All work files stored in OneDrive (previously Dropbox) … so thats 3 copies
Hourly Timemachine on iMac … +1 = 4 copies
Daily CarbonCopyClone of drive … +1 = 5 copies
Anyone have experience with Macmini‘s ? There are a few from 2012 for around €600 incl Monitor.
I use a drobo for my backups with timemachine and a separate time capsule, all stored in a rack and connected via cable LAN.
600 Euros is way too much for a 2012 Mac Mini in my opinion. I purchased one recently from a high street tech exchange shop for GBP 200 with a 24 month warrantee. I already had a monitor, keyboard and mouse but these wouldn’t have cost GBP400 new.
I did replace the 500 Gb HDD with a 500 Gb SSD and put in some memory I had laying around to make it up to 8 Gb and it runs a treat. It even runs Catalina :)
Good to know… wow that’s like€250. I’m in Germany