Mac Backup strategy: Better Mac Backup guide

Data backup is one of many aspects that the Mac designers really think about. Mac Backup is not a perfect story, but it's obviously better than Windows and Linux.

If you're a storage administrator, having a typical web-based backup product is not a bigger challenge for you than the other desktop Mac. You install the Mac OS version of the backup agent software, schedule the backup, and then the magic will appear. This article is not aimed at such a company. The discussion here is either for small companies that do not have network backup products that support Mac systems, or for individual users who want to make sure their Macs are properly backed up. Here you will learn about Mac backup strategies and some of the best practices for Mac backup.

Back up the MacBook

Let's talk about the MacBook first and I think it should be completely mobile. The first thing to do is make sure they have a large enough hard drive to put all the data inside. (The size depends on the user, but if you have a portion of the file on an external hard drive due to a lack of built-in hard disk space, your built-in hard drive is not big enough). Using a USB hard drive to make a backup is no mistake, but using it as a primary storage makes backup a lot more cumbersome. So make sure that all of your MacBook users upgrade their internal hard disks to be large enough to keep all of their data.

Assuming all the MacBook data is stored in its built-in hard drive, there are two ways you can back it up. One way to do this is to give all the MacBook users an external hard drive that is larger than their root disk USB or FireWire interface, and then set it to your Apple "time Machine" disk. It's easy to use a "time machine". Just insert a hard drive and the Mac system will ask you if you want to use it as your time machine disk. Answer "yes", and then you're backing up the disk. If you plug it in, the time machine automatically backs it up every day. If you don't usually plug it in, you should plug it in once a day to make a backup. As soon as you plug it in, the time machine will see it and start making your daily backups, which only takes a few minutes. If, for some reason, you forget to insert it for several days, the time machine will remind you. Recovery is also very simple. Insert your backup disk, turn on the time machine, and select the file you want to recover.

One of the challenges with this idea is that the backup disk is located near the main disk, and if you put your backup disk with your notebook and lose it, your backup and your master copy will be lost together. The only way to prevent this from happening is to use network-based backups, but this can be a bit of a hassle for mobile machines. Therefore, a cloud-based backup service may be the best way to back up a mobile machine. We'll talk about this later, but even if you use a cloud-based backup company, there's nothing wrong with using a time machine.

imac Backup

On the other hand, the imac is not mobile, and when used normally, it is usually connected to some kind of LAN. For these users, it may be best to consider a snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) or a Linux server so that they have centralized user accounts and network-loaded home directories. This will greatly simplify your backup environment. A snow Leopard Mac Mini Server is just 999 dollars. A Linux server may be cheaper, but you need to configure LDAP and NFS, which can be difficult. If you can guarantee that users will use the Internet home directory and never save data in the root directory, you can simplify your backup system to a large extent.

If you can't do this, you can still connect a USB or FireWire disk to use the time machine. If you have several machines to protect, it may cost a bit higher. Get an Apple time capsule (a small machine dedicated to storing time machine backups), or a system that can provide each machine with a "sparsebundle" file to store the time machine backup's support time machine. This can be completely automatic, and the result is that all imac backups are far from the Mac.

The challenge in this way is that Sparsebundle is a single file that can be corrupted if something happens when it is running a backup. To solve this problem, some administrators use two sparsebundle files. At the end of each backup, they ran fsck on Sparsebundle to make sure it wasn't corrupted at the time of the backup. If FSCK is working properly, then everything is fine. If it's not normal, you can delete and reconstruct the mirrored file without losing data because you have a "backup" mirror file.

Cloud Backup Services

For the imac, MacBook, PC, and notebook, the best choice for a small IT department might be a cloud-based backup service. If you have only a few gigabytes of data, you can install the software and do your first backup via the Internet. However, if you have a few machines and hundreds of GB of data, you need to find a cloud backup company that provides the SEED service option, which allows you to back up to a USB disk that they send you. You make your first backup on this disk and send it to them. They put it in their backup system to save you a couple of weeks of uploading time. The two products providing this service are CrashPlan and jungle Disk.

With a little planning, it's easy to give your Mac a good backup plan and Mac backup strategy. As discussed earlier, it is also possible to have a backup system that can be used for Mac, Windows, and Linux unification. If you have a mixed environment, make sure you consider the latter.