As a freelance developer I have multiple projects on my laptop, along with site backups, older versions, etc. If this stuff disappears it could mean weeks to months of lost time and will lead me to curling into the fetal position in a corner and crying over and over again.
I currently have four backups, yes four, and three different methods for each:
- Time Machine backing up to a NAS with two mirrored disks.
- Carbon Copy Cloner backup up to the same NAS.
- Time Machine backup up to a WD MyBook.
- Backblaze cloud backup.
As far as I can tell, none are 100% reliable, and thus enter my frustrated post.
For the past couple of days TM has been telling me it cannot backup to the MyBook and to check it with Disk Utility. Now, you see, I did this about two months ago so I know what it means. It means that somehow the TM file is corrupt and it’s going to format the drive and start again. I run Disk Utility anyway, and sure enough, the drive is now being formatted.
One backup down.
Since this happened, I started thinking, what happened to Carbon Copy Cloner, I haven’t heard from that app in awhile. So I check, I find it’s been running daily, and it’s been failing daily for the past three months. Thanks for the notification.
I decided to manually run CCC, it starts, then fails and says the destination drive is full. I guess it must be backing up more that 300gb, because that’s how much is free. Again, thanks for nothing.
Two backups down.
Back to TM and the NAS. This thing fails about every two months like clockwork. I’ve Googled this one, search numerous Mac/OSX/Apple forums about it and it just seems to be that TM has issues with backing up over wifi and will eventually fail. I actually just started a new backup about 3 weeks ago on this one. *two thumbs up*
Three backups down.
Backblaze. It seems to work, but because it’s a cloud service, it only goes back 30 days for deleted files and revisions. I have this for worst case scenario reasons like fire, theft, rabid raccoons, etc. My problem with this one isn’t the 30 day thing, it’s that I can make changes to or add files, tell it to backup and it immediately will tell me that it’s up to date without backing up files. Maybe I’m being picky, but I think it should backup things if I tell it to, not when it decides to find them.
Fourth backup not down, but I’m disappointed in you.
Now to finish wasting my time making sure that my backups are all working.