No I am not talking about a Back to the Future machine, but simply the backup application that comes with most of the latest Apple Mac OS.
As a system administrator, I spend considerable amount of time and effort managing backups for servers at work. However I have always try to use similar methods when it comes to backing up files for my home computer, which is to make things very complicated.
Since upgrading to the Mac OS Lion, I have set up Time Machine to handle certain backups of the system to an external drive. However since I have a huge Aperture archive, I remembered excluding that from the backup. Last year, as soon as the newest Mac Mini came to the market, I purchase the box, and migrated all my files from my old machine to the new one. When I came back from a month long vacation in Asia, I uploaded all my photos to Aperture, and went on deleting some of my SD cards.
3 months into the new Mac Mini, it crashed! And it's not a simple OS crash, but the hard disk has failed. I can hear clicking noise. Now, I have a Time Machine backup for most of the my files but the most important one, the Aperture archive is not! After considerable amount of efforts, I decided that the hard drive cannot be revived, and I have to get it replaced. But I cannot bear thinking about the amount of photos I have lost, anything since I last save my photos to a vault.
Fast forward to the moment I start reinstalling Mac OS on the new drive, and start getting things restored from the external Time Machine drive. After a few hours of copying, I finally got my Mac OS up again. And the first thing I did was to launch Aperture and look at my photos. To my surprise, my "Bangkok 2012" project was there. My "KL and Singapore 2012" projects were there as well, and so were all my recently uploaded photos.
By luck, I have not set up my Time Machine properly and it has been backing up everything. That's why I have been getting request from Time Machine to delete older backups to make space.
Well, the first thing I did after that was to go and get an additional 4TB external drive, and add to my Time Machine . It's a no-brainer. Not only it restore my Aperture files, it also made system recovery extremely easy. That's what I call good backup program. Runs silently but deliver when it is really needed. And the couple hundred dollars spent on the external drive is well worth it.
Now, I just need to find an affordable place to keep some of my important files offsite.
