Have You Backed-up Today?

There's nothing worse that losing data from a failed hard drive. It's why so many people so strongly recommend backing up your data. If you don't have a backup routine in place, start one today. The old adage "it's not if, but when" applies here. If you haven't had a HD failure yet, you will some day and then that backup will start looking mighty handsome.

Fortunately, there are a number of backup solutions for Mac OS X: Carbon Copy Cloner, SuperDuper, RsyncX, Retrospect, Sychronize Pro, just to name a few. Even Apple offers a program called Backup with their .Mac service. They all work with varying degrees of complexity. Some of these are even free.

If you're new to the idea of backing up, I suggest reading Matt Henderson's excellent write-up about how he backs up computers at his workplace. I use a similar set up to back up my data at home.

Most hard drives shipped in the last several years have built into them a technology called S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting
Technology). It allows the hard disks to self-monitor several important attributes of a disk and report back to the end-user if something's about to fail. Most disk utiility programs now will tell you if a S.M.A.R.T. test has failed, including Disk Utility, TechTool Pro, and DiskWarrior. S.M.A.R.T. is great but doesn't help you if you don't actively look to see if a S.M.A.R.T. test is failing. Here's where I use a menubar application called SMARTReporter. It lives in your menubar and will, quite simply, warn you if a S.M.A.R.T. test has failed by turning its icon red instead of green.

It can also be set to send you an email if it detects a S.M.A.R.T. failure. I run this on several servers I maintain.

Tell us about your backup routines, or your horror stories? What recommendations do you have for backup software, or which do you think readers should avoid?