hard Disk back up system

[Ginridge]

I have a macbook pro running OSX 10.7.5 using PT 10 recording tracks to a Glyph GT1050Q hard drive (1tb). I'd like to find a way to regularly back up this external drive to a second glyph drive. I've done this before by simply copying the entire disk (about 220 MB at this point) but have to assume that there is a better, more efficient way to do regular back ups.

I did a quick search of the forum archives but the top responses date to 2008. Is there a back up program or technique folks could recommend?

Thanks!

[Ben Jenssen]

I just use Timemachine. It comes with OSX.
I'm on OSX 10.7 like you, but on a Mac Pro 3.1.

Timemachine is supposed to work all the time, but I turn it off and instead use a small freeware called TimeMachineEditor to set backup to happen once a day. You can of course turn TM off and just start a backup manually when it suits you.

Also TM is set up to backup everything, so if you want it to be restricted to just your sessions disk, you just exclude other disks in TM control panel.

Works great for me, and have been for years.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by Ginridge

I have a macbook pro running OSX 10.7.5 using PT 10 recording tracks to a Glyph GT1050Q hard drive (1tb). I'd like to find a way to regularly back up this external drive to a second glyph drive. I've done this before by simply copying the entire disk (about 220 MB at this point) but have to assume that there is a better, more efficient way to do regular back ups.

I did a quick search of the forum archives but the top responses date to 2008. Is there a back up program or technique folks could recommend?

Thanks!

Manually can be pretty good -- especially if you are connecting and removing the drive for each backup.

And maybe more importantly...

how/have you verified the copies are readable and "correct" (e.g. not accidently missing audio content linked from a session).

Hopefully if the backup is another external glyph drive it is removed from the computer after the backup is done, stored somewhere safe/secure, maybe offsite. A huge amount of data loss is caused by human error, you do not want the backups connected to the same computer ther are protecting, and vunerable to accidental deletion.

I hope you realize that only having a single backup is a weak approach, e.g. If your source drive/media has a problem and you back it up and that backup dies part way through because of the source fault, you may no longer have a backup to recover from. A better approach uses several volumes to back up to. I would use a combination of cloud and physical disk backups, and archiving high value assets to optical DVD-ROM.

Time machine is rarely likely to be my preferred choice for backing up anything except as a general user file backup going to a NAS server. And in this case iifyou want the sessions directly accessible in that backup drive you cannot use time machine. For system volume backups I use carbon copy cloner, that can also clone session volumes, and won't say miss any files on there, but if working on stuff I would generally prefer to manually drag across the most recent stuff to a folder with a new version/date/name if needed. CCC also lets you do a combination of manual drag over and rename as well as automatic cloning (just tell it not to ever delete stuff on the target disk).

Whatever you use, you have to verify it works, do test restores somewhere (not to your live drive). The more complex/smart something gets the more opportunity for tears....