DMGBackups Revisited
A couple of weeks ago, the hard drive on my laptop failed. It didn't go down entirely, but it did cause the machine to crash frequently. Filesystem errors were accumulating, and the Disk Utility couldn't fix them. It was time to replace the drive.
Long story short: this was a horrible pain. The disk image I thought would save me was hopelessly corrupted. The OS X "install" disks refused to install OS X on a blank hard drive. The Disk Utility refused to restore from my old, semi-working hard drive onto the new drive. And my Powerbook can only boot from a Firewire drive, not USB, because of a quirk in OS X 10.3's boot sequence. And I don't have a Firewire drive.
I followed the instructions on ifixit.com for replacing the hard drive in my Powerbook, posted to the OS X Hints forums, and basically tried everything I could think of, and finally got everything working again. I have a stable Powerbook with a new, much larger hard drive, and I'm happy.
But the fact remains: my backup system failed. So it's time to reexamine.
John Gruber and Merlin Mann (badass techies), posted to their respective blogs about recent recoveries from hard drive failures, and the tools they use for backups and recoveries.
So, here's my new system.
First, it was clear that as spiffy as rsync is, it just isn't up to the task of backing up a whole drive, at least in my case.
So I took Gruber and Mann's advice and bought SuperDuper!. I now have a complete disk image of my Powerbook's hard drive, and SuperDuper! updates that image each night.
And just like I do now, I'll have a second drive that I keep in sync with my main backup drive. I'll sync that drive once a month or so, and keep it locked in a drawer at work.
So I'm automated, and fully redundant: more than one copy in more than one place.
So I'm totally covered. I think.
And I'm going to do as Merlin Mann recommends, and have a couple of USB sticks with the absolutely vital stuff on them.
Now, it's true that you really don't know how good your backups are until you try to restore from them. So I'll have to do that once in a while, too.