Q: Best practices for storage and backups on internal and external drives
Hello,
I have a Mac laptop and I would like your advice on how to organise file storage on the internal and external drives and how the optimise the backup plan.
As of now, my file storage organisation is as follows:
I keep my most important files on the internal encrypted SSD drive and less critical files on an external encrypted drive (ExFAT formatted). This external drive has been giving errors so I bought a new LaCia 2 Tb drive which I formatted in Mac OS journaled with encryption instead of ExFAT, to replace it.
For backups, I don't use Time Machine, but I use an app that synchronizes files between two drives. Using this app, I first sync the critical document files on the internal SSD to the external drive, and then I sync the entire external drive to another external drive.
My question is, should I keep this file storage organisation or should I, for instance just move all my files, critical and non critical to the internal SSD (I could make enough room for that) and then backup up the entire Mac with Time Machine? Or there is another optimal way to organise the files within this scenario?
The second question is, if it's best to keep the storage split organisation as is (critical on internal, less critical on external) what would be the best way to backup everything?
Thanks in advance for all contributions.
MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X El Capitan (10.11.2)
Posted on Dec 17, 2015 8:35 PM
Keep it simple. Time Machine to an encrypted volume, either directly-attached or via Time Capsule.
We all get busy, and many of us don't run manual backups as often as we should. Any backups beat no backups. Recent backups beat old backups. Current backups beat recent backups.
Time Machine is built in, works, can be encrypted, and there are folks here that can usually help if something goes sideways. Yes, once in a while TM gets itself tangled or a TM target disk itself gets corrupted or fails, so either performing an occasional Time Capsule archive or having multiple TM disk or Time Capsule targets can help.
Off-site is nice to have, once basic backups are sorted. If the laptop comes and goes to an office or other location, then there's a potential TM offsite backup, if you can configure a disk or a Time Capsule there. It's also possible to rotate TM backups, though disks do tend to get bumped or dropped.
If your network bandwidth is commensurate with your particular volume of data, uploading some or all or just the most critical data can be appropriate, too. A service such as SpiderOak targets folks fond of encryption, for instance. Or get your own hosting and your own storage, AES-encrypt the data, and upload it yourself — if you wanted to write or acquire the necessary scripts, and schedule the scripts to run. (Again, manually triggered backups are only any good when they are reliably used.)
Disk clones don't get you any depth of backup. You get one copy. If your clone had the bad or corrupt file, you're toast. They're also wasteful of disk space, unless you go to a non-bootable compressed-format archive of some sort. (Then you get to figure out how you'll recovery that, if your OS X boot disk is corrupted, or your Mac gets lost or stolen or irreparably damaged.)
It's quite correct that TM isn't directly bootable, but having a local bootable USB key disk is trivial to set up and use, and many of the Mac systems now support Internet Recovery. OS X recovery mechanisms, as well as OS X migrations and upgrades can all source their input data from Time Machine backups. With third-party backup tools or with clones using dd or Disk Utility or other tools, you'll want to determine how to recover that data, and then use it to perform the install or upgrade or migration.
All backups do occasionally fail, and not enough folks test their own recovery path.
If you're not exchanging data with other systems via external device via the particular device, I'd not use FAT or ExFAT. I'd use GPT-partitioned HFS+-formatted disks; native-format OS X disk volumes.
Encrypted internal disks via FileVault 2 and via encrypted external backups — assuming the encryption keys are sufficiently robustly chosen, and are not forgotten — beats having unencrypted backups, particularly if the Mac or the disk gets stolen or (as all hardware eventually becomes) scrapped.
All storage devices eventually and inevitably fail. Application and system upgrades fail. Volumes get corrupted. Keys get forgotten. Mistakes happen. Etc.
Having any backups beats having no backups.
Posted on Dec 19, 2015 11:28 AM