DACS General Meeting
March 2, 2010
Meeting Review:
Backups!

by Richard Corzo

Our March meeting covered that all-important subject that we almost always neglect to consider—backups! DACS president Rob Limbaugh explained the purpose of a backup as providing a way to restore a system to a previous state or condition. A backup may duplicate all or part of a system.

It’s vital to know where your data is stored. If it’s organized it will be easier to back up and restore. Don’t let local copies be your only form of backup, as a fire, flood, or theft is likely to take out your backup as well as your original data. Consider off site storage for an additional form of backup. Figure out what to back up and create a schedule for doing so.

Rob explained the types of backup as being ad hoc (piles of CDs or floppies), full, incremental (what’s changed since the last backup), differential (what’s changed since the last full backup), and RAID—replication of disk media in real time.

To recover from overwriting or deleting data, use the Recycle Bin/Trash, Previous Versions (Windows), Time Machine (Mac), Back in Time (Linux). To recover from system failures, external disasters, or theft, you’ll need to repair or replace the equipment and restore from a backup on external media.

Rob also brought to our attention the Recuva utility, which can recover deleted, or inaccessible data on a compact flash, smart media, or secure digital (SD) card. Some online backup services to consider are Mozy, Carbonite, Acronis, and Amazon S3. Iron Mountain is an off site storage service used by businesses.

Rob’s personal backup regimen combines continuous backup and removable media. His computers are backed up to a file server, and the latter is backed up to an online account. He also has an external USB drive that he uses to periodically back up each system including the file server.

Check the Downloads page for Rob’s presentation as well as for the separate Linux and Mac presentations that followed.

Former Linux SIG leader Drew Kwashnak next covered the Linux strategy. He explained how Linux distributions tend to install separate root and home partitions. Having a separate root partition makes it easy to update a distro without disturbing user data.

One thing to keep track of on a Linux system is what software has been installed. The repository used for this differs based on whether it’s a Debian-based distro (such as Ubuntu) or a Red Hat-based one. He showed the commands that could be entered to back up and restore a Linux system.

Command line rsync and its corresponding GUI program Grsync are key backup programs in Linux. Back in Time is a tool inspired by Mac’s Time Machine, and finally Clonezilla can clone an entire partition or disk.

Mac SIG leader Richard Corzo covered the Mac backup options. Of course, since Mac OS X Leopard (10.5), the most famous backup program for the Mac is Time Machine. All that is required is to plug in an external FireWire or USB hard drive. The Mac will ask you whether you would like to use it as the Time Machine drive, and then Time Machine will take care of the rest. It will back up every hour, and consolidate backups at the end of the day, week, and month.

Richard also covered Carbon Copy Cloner and SuperDuper!, two Mac backup programs which can make bootable clone copies of a system and make backups on a schedule. He reminded us to consider whether our backups include our iTunes music, showing the iTunes menu items that can supplement our full system backups if needed. For an off site solution, he discussed MobileMe, its syncing capabilities, and iDisk personal Web storage.

DACS seemed to cover all the bases, and help us prepare for that inevitable day when we might need to recover our data.