Backup, backup, backup your data files now.

I have been doing daily backups of my data files (photos, movies, documents) that I feel are very important to me.  About four years ago I had a crash of my Apple G5 system drive (cost me a lot of time to restore and find applications again), and ever since I have been backing up very carefully.

Now I’m running a Mac Pro with four internal drives and an external raid on a Sonnet 5-drive D500P Sata storage system with port multipliers.  I use SoftRAID software on the Sonnet and on two of my internal Mac Pro drives.

Well, last week my backup boot drive (internal bay 2) crashed on me and this time I did not sweat it, since this was my backup drive. I went out and purchased a new Hitachi 1TB drive ($54) and restored from the main drive and I was done.  The drive that failed had just over 17,000 hours running time, which is a lot less than the average MTBF numbers thrown about by the disk drive manufacturers.  

I use SuperDuper from Shirt Pocket software (purchased copy) to manage my daily backups and using the Smart Update feature, makes my backup very short after the initial full backup.  This feature compares drives, and backs up only new and modified files so it runs in a fraction of the time.

So all I can say is backup, backup, backup your data.  If you lost thousands of your digital photo files to a crash, you will think the small added cost of extra backup drives to be a small investment for sure.