{"id":1037,"date":"2005-05-24T13:32:22","date_gmt":"2005-05-24T17:32:22","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=1037"},"modified":"2016-07-28T09:53:36","modified_gmt":"2016-07-28T13:53:36","slug":"my-new-backup-strategy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2005\/05\/24\/my-new-backup-strategy\/","title":{"rendered":"My New Backup Strategy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\r\nRetrospect<\/a> is no longer<\/a> working reliably for me. Aside from the performance problems<\/a>, I’m getting frequent internal assertion errors, and scheduled backups don’t always fire under Tiger.\r\n<\/p>\r\n\r\n

\r\nI’ve found a combination of software that lets me do most of what I used to do with Retrospect. In some ways, it’s more convenient; in others, it’s less. It does, however, it give me more peace of mind.\r\n<\/p>\r\n\r\n

\r\nMy twice-daily incremental backup is now done with Synchronize!\r\nPro X<\/a>. This copies everything to an external FireWire drive, and it uses Synchronize’s archive feature to preserve old versions of the files. I compress the archive folders to save space. This is not as nice as with Retrospect, because Finder-format backups are inefficient, and the archive folders are a poor substitute for Retrospect’s snapshot feature.\r\n<\/p>\r\n\r\n

\r\nTo archive old versions of files and allow for off-site backups, I use\r\nCDFinder<\/a>, DropDMG<\/a> and Toast<\/a>. I have a DropDMG configuration<\/a> that creates encrypted, compressed disk images that are segmented into DVD-sized chunks, tagged with the date, and saved on the external FireWire drive. When I’m done for the day, I drag my key folders onto DropDMG, and by morning I have a bunch of .dmg<\/tt> and .dmgpart<\/tt> files.\r\n<\/p>\r\n\r\n

\r\nEvery few days, I burn a set of the disk images to DVD. First, I mount the disk images and drag them onto CDFinder to catalog them. Then I burn them with Toast. Overall, this works better than it did with Retrospect. By snapshotting everything to disk images before burning, I can do work (using the files that were copied to the disk images) during<\/em> the burning. With Retrospect, I always dreaded starting a new DVD backup set, because it meant hours of swapping disks, and I couldn’t, for instance, run Mailsmith while backing up the Mail folder. Also, Toast is much faster at burning than Retrospect, and it fits more per DVD. A possible downside is that the DVD backups are no longer incremental, but I’ve decided that this is a plus. With each DVD set being a full backup, I can take it off-site right away.\r\n<\/p>\r\n\r\n

\r\nFor restores, it’s a pain to copy multiple (usually one or two) .dmgpart<\/tt> files back to the hard disk before I can mount the image. Restoring is rare, however, and this procedure is much faster than rebuilding a Retrospect catalog. It also works with a fresh OS installation; there's no need to locate a Retrospect install CD and download the update that lets it launch on Tiger.\r\n<\/p>\r\n\r\n

\r\nUpdate: As of August 2005 I am now using DropDMG<\/a> instead of Toast to do the burning.\r\n<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Retrospect is no longer working reliably for me. Aside from the performance problems, I’m getting frequent internal assertion errors, and scheduled backups don’t always fire under Tiger. I’ve found a combination of software that lets me do most of what I used to do with Retrospect. In some ways, it’s more convenient; in others, it’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"","apple_news_api_id":"","apple_news_api_modified_at":"","apple_news_api_revision":"","apple_news_api_share_url":"","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[371],"class_list":["post-1037","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-dropdmg"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1037","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1037"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1037\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15408,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1037\/revisions\/15408"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1037"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1037"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1037"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}