So I just purchased a beast of a external HD (2TB io Safe) http://www.amazon.com/Fireproof-Waterproof-External-Recovery-SL2000GBUSB20/dp/B002USP01Y/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1291803104&sr=8-2

I'm fairly inexperienced when it comes to the backup game, so I wanted some suggestions.

I have 2 TB so I partitioned the drive into 3 sections, (1) being a slim OS with nothing on it as you've recommend on past threads. (1) Being a personal file dump and (1) being a media drive.

I'm going to create an archive of JUST homefolder and just place that on the OS partition.

Now some Questions:

- Is that the correct method for a proper backup regarding the HomeFolder? Or should I do an actual startup folder backup?

- I'm an artist and work with particular folders often and want to set hourly captures of them. Do you suggest that I set up a new action rule in my HomeFolder archive; to capture my folders every hour? I'm thinking that I should set up an whole new archive to capture the folders and place that on my (Personal) partition.

- If I capture my HomeFolder and set it for daily captures, how often should someone verify the backup? Would a weekly verification be enough or should I do them more often? Is it safe to compact the HomeFolder archive? Also, I might have messed up on this but I made the OS Partiton no bigger than my working computers partition. I'm going to assume that QRecall wont have much play when it comes to rolling merges, so should I set up a new partition with added storage?

- I have some files that are on a PC. My iMac(which the Ext. HD is connected) and my PC share the same home network, with a cat5 cable running to each(no wireless). I would like to capture some partition drives off of my PC. No windows files, just media files(mp3s, avi's, various documents). Any way to create a backup method for them? Some of the drives are rather large (300 GB is the largest) so I'm assuming that it would take massive time to do this over cat5. In the meantime, I have Acronis backing up to another Wester Digital HD.

- I have Drive Genius 3 and DiskWarrior. Should I run some of these programs monthly for preventative measures? DiskWarrior recommends that you run their program on your HD once a month. I'm kind of the guy that likes to do scans to prevent any hiccups, but I know that sometimes I should just let things be...



I know that a lot of these questions are personal preferences, which I hope to gain with a little more time, trial, hopefully no error... But for those of you that have a large HD, what would your strategy be?

Adam Horne wrote:So I just purchased a beast of a external HD (2TB io Safe)

Very cool. I didn't even know they made waterproof disk drives.

I'm going to create an archive of JUST homefolder and just place that on the OS partition.

I'd recommend capturing your entire startup volume as your baseline (i.e. once-a-day) routine. If you've gone to the trouble of creating a partition with a bootable OS and a copy of QRecall so that you can make quick recoveries, this will save you if you experience a total meltdown of your boot drive?but only if you have a complete capture.

Without capturing your entire volume, it will totally spoil the mood. You will have to first find your Install DVD, go through the OS install process, reboot and upgrade the OS, restore your home folder, then manually reinstall all of your applications. If you're going to go through all that, having a bootable partition is somewhat moot.

The advantage if the bootable partition is that if something catastrophic happens to your boot volume, all you have to do is boot from the recovery partition, fire up QRecall, perform a full restore of your boot volume, restart and go right back to work. But this only works if you make regular backups of your entire boot volume.

- Is that the correct method for a proper backup regarding the HomeFolder? Or should I do an actual startup folder backup?

My advice? Capture your entire startup drive every day. In its QRecall form, your entire operating system will take up less than 2GB. That 0.1% of your new drive. Well worth the tiny bit of storage.

- I'm an artist and work with particular folders often and want to set hourly captures of them. Do you suggest that I set up a new action rule in my HomeFolder archive; to capture my folders every hour? I'm thinking that I should set up an whole new archive to capture the folders and place that on my (Personal) partition.

Don't create another archive. That just makes QRecall do double the work, use (nearly) twice as much disk space, and complicates the restoration process. Create a second (or third) action to capture your working folders for more agressive backups. On my system, I capture my startup drive once a day, my home folder every two hours, and just my "Projects" folder every 20 minutes.

- If I capture my HomeFolder and set it for daily captures, how often should someone verify the backup? Would a weekly verification be enough or should I do them more often?

I recommend verifying your archive about once a week.

Is it safe to compact the HomeFolder archive?

Safe as houses.

Also, I might have messed up on this but I made the OS Partiton no bigger than my working computers partition. I'm going to assume that QRecall wont have much play when it comes to rolling merges, so should I set up a new partition with added storage?

I'd recommend a backup partition between 1x and 1.5x the size of the data (not the volume) you want to capture, depending on how much history you want to maintain. So if your current drive is less than 65% full, then you have plenty of space for your archive. If you tend to fill up your drive, or generate big changes, I'd increase the size of your backup partition by 50%.

For most situations, QRecall can keep a year's worth of weekly incremental backups using between 1.2x to 1.5x the size of the original data on the disk. For example, my Mac Pro has a 740GB boot drive that's about 70% full (around 540GB of data). I have a 70 layer archive that's keeping incremental backup going back a year and half. That archive is 923GB, or 1.7x the size of the data on the disk. And remember, you can alway turn on QRecall compression if you want to reduce the size of the archive.

- I have some files that are on a PC. My iMac(which the Ext. HD is connected) and my PC share the same home network, with a cat5 cable running to each(no wireless). I would like to capture some partition drives off of my PC. No windows files, just media files(mp3s, avi's, various documents). Any way to create a backup method for them?

QRecall will capture (almost) anything that can be read by OS X. There are some permission and restore issues the can occur when capturing or restoring files from a non-HFS file system, but for plain vanilla files these are negligible. Just set up a QRecall action to capture the folders from your shared volume. If this is a networked volume, you might want to set the action up to run when the folder mounts. Otherwise, if the action is scheduled to run and the folder isn't mounted, nothing gets backed up.

Some of the drives are rather large (300 GB is the largest) so I'm assuming that it would take massive time to do this over cat5.

It depends on what your network speeds are. 100Mb Ethernet can move ~600MB/minute, so an initial 300GB capture would only take 8-10 hours (to a local hard drive). And remember, after the initial capture QRecall only recaptures what changed; subsequent captures will probably only take 10 minutes or so. Gigabit Ethernet can approach hard disk speeds.

- I have Drive Genius 3 and DiskWarrior. Should I run some of these programs monthly for preventative measures? DiskWarrior recommends that you run their program on your HD once a month. I'm kind of the guy that likes to do scans to prevent any hiccups, but I know that sometimes I should just let things be...

In general, don't worry about it unless something goes wrong. QRecall is downright paranoid about data integrity. If anything looks wrong with the data in your archive, QRecall will immediately stop. Your weekly verify will validate every single bit of data in your archive. If even a single hair it out of place, it will let you know. If the verify give you a clean bill of health, you have nothing to worry about.

If an action or verify does report a problem, then the first thing to do is repair the archive's volume using Disk Utility, Disk Warrior, etc. Then repair the QRecall archive. Many QRecall data integrity problems are really caused by corrupted volume structures, and trying to repair the archive before repairing the volume can actually cause more damage.

Here's my final recommendation: Start by using the capture assistant to create a backup strategy. Set it up to keep your data "as long as possible." Take a good look at the actions created by the assistent, and then tweak them as desired, change their schedules, whatever. Then add a verify action that runs once a week and any additional capture actions (like your Documents folder) that you want to run during the day. Once you have that all working, repeat the process with your networked volume of media files.

Good luck,

Thanks for the wonderful advice, James.

Would you mind going through your process for installing your slim OS on a USB drive?

I know how to install the OS on the drive itself, but what do you do after that?

You said you erase everything, but terminal and disk utility. Do you literally just go through the application folder and delete everything? Do you delete more?

Do you install all the updates Apple puts out for the OS?

I want to work on this tomorrow and just wanted some guidance...

Thanks for the help again.

Adam Horne wrote:Would you mind going through your process for installing your slim OS on a USB drive?

I know how to install the OS on the drive itself, but what do you do after that?

As little, or as much, as you want. The goal is to create a small footprint for the recovery OS. Depending on how big your emergency startup volume is, this might mean stripping every last possible byte to make it fit, or just trying not to waste too many gigabytes.

The biggest gain (loss?) is to start with the OS X install options. During installation, make sure to uncheck any optional features (additional languages, printer drivers, etc.).

You said you erase everything, but terminal and disk utility.

Optional. But there are scores of applications that you'll never use on your recovery drive, so that's just space you can't use for backups.

Do you literally just go through the application folder and delete everything?

Pretty much.

Do you delete more?

I suppose you could, but the optional install packages and the extraneous applications are the low hanging fruit. Trying to find more to shed gets progressively harder, with little to gain.

Do you install all the updates Apple puts out for the OS?

I don't bother. The only really important thing is that the major version of the operating system must be the same as the one you're trying to restore. So if you're running 10.6.4 you'll need to boot some version of 10.6.x in order to restore it. The same is true for 10.5 and 10.4. Remember, the key to an emergency startup volume is that it's reliable, not that it's up-to-date.

Best of luck.

I am revisiting my backup strategy again. What I would like is a way to separate backup and restore of the OSX system files from the User files.

Following your advice I intend to have QRecall capture two archives: one being System, Applications, and so on; the other the User Home folder with all documents, pictures, music, and so forth.

My reason is that I want to have at least one known-good backup of the System. If I keep backing up to the same archiive I worry that corruption will creep in. On the other hand I want to have a more up to date backup of working files, User materials. I also use Time Machine for finer-grained regular backups.

I prefer not to back up the whole volume because if I do the time to do incremental updates may become long, with QRecall picking up on a zillion new changes through the System, Library, Applications and such.

I do have a bootable disk with a minimal version of the same OSX version, QRecall, and Disk Utility.

Further advice?

Bob Tyson wrote:If I keep backing up to the same archiive I worry that corruption will creep in.

There are lots of good reasons to split (or combine) your backups amongst archives, but trying to protect against corruption isn't one of them. The important information in an archive is stored in the primary repository file. When you capture files, new data is added to this file, but the existing data is never overwritten. The data already captured is just as safe whether it's in the archive you're capturing to or another archive on the same volume. If you're worried about data integrity, schedule a verify action to run regularly.

It's true that some archive index files get rewritten whenever you capture new items, and the more often you capture, the greater the chance there is for something to go wrong and trash one of them. But all of the information in the index files is redundant and can be reconstructed from the data in the primary repository file.

I prefer not to back up the whole volume because if I do the time to do incremental updates may become long, with QRecall picking up on a zillion new changes through the System, Library, Applications and such.

Unless you've just run a major system upgrade, your core OS and application files don't really change that much.

There are clear advantages, and disadvantages, to subdividing your backups. But it's hard to make any broad recommendations. Instead, I suggest you develop a backup workflow. I like to start by considering what could go wrong:
- Accidental damage, overwrite, or deletion of my files
- Failure of working system or drive
- Failure of backup storage device
- Failure of secondary backup storage device (if any)

Then, for each of these situations, consider what steps you'd have to take to recover the files you need, restore you boot system, replace you backup drive, and so on.

Then consider what steps or processes you'll need to perform every day to maintain your backups.

Every decision you make will impact one or more of these three areas. For example, consolidating all of your backups into a single archive simplifies every aspect of your backup workflow, but puts "all of your eggs in one basket." Conversely, separately backing up your system and user documents might make it quick and easy to restore your OS in the case of a total system failure, but that might be little comfort if you can't also restore all of your documents.

James Bucanek wrote:

Bob Tyson wrote:If I keep backing up to the same archiive I worry that corruption will creep in.

There are lots of good reasons to split (or combine) your backups amongst archives, but trying to protect against corruption isn't one of them.

Of course, and you are quite right. I didn't explain my worry clearly. It would be corruption creeping into the System files over time, and then being backed up where it would be re-introduced during a restore action, that worries me. I'm NOT worried about the backup archives themselves.

James Bucanek wrote:

Bob Tyson wrote: I suggest you develop a backup workflow. I like to start by considering what could go wrong:
- Accidental damage, overwrite, or deletion of my files
- Failure of working system or drive
- Failure of backup storage device
- Failure of secondary backup storage device (if any).

Yes, again. I have tried to cover each of those bases. I like the way I can archive with QRecall, which I have set up to back up the system and my personal set of applications. I've made a "Known Good" initial backup of those elements. Then as a working backup I've backed up the system again, into a second archive so that I can update regularly using QRecall, but preserve that "known good" if disaster should strike.

I have to grant that Time Machine works well for continuous backup and restore of the whole User file set, and I'm using it for that.

My archives are:

Two 1.5 TB drives, each partitioned into two volumes. One volume on each is for User - Time Machine backups; the other on each is for QRecall created backups of the system, applications, and my separate, external data disks.

My "mirror" consists of having Time Machine back everything up to one disk, then the other, to start. Then switch back and forth frequently. Similar habit for QRecall and the other data, or else a simple copy of everything on one disk to the other.

I know there is always a worst (even just "worse"??) case scenario, but then again I could be hit by a bus -- while still asleep in bed?

BT