Is your external backup hard drive full of Time Machine backup data? In last week’s Tech Tip, we talked about how Time Machine automatically deletes your oldest backups to make room for new backups. Time Machine typically does this, but I’ve seen it misbehave also. Alternatively, you might want to manually delete some of your old Time Machine backups to free up space on the external hard drive for some other use. In any case, here are instructions on how to manually delete some Time Machine backups.

On your Mac’s Desktop, double-click the icon of the external hard drive that stores your Time Machine backup data.

You’ll see a folder with the curious name of Backups.backupdb. Open this folder.

Inside you’ll see  a separate folder for each Macintosh computer that is backed up to this drive. If you only backup one Mac, then you’ll only see one folder. The folder is typically named something like Susan’s iMac. Open the folder containing the backups you want to delete.

Wait for the contents to be displayed. It could take a minute. Eventually, you’ll see a list of folders whose names are comprised of date and time stamps. Each of these folders contains backup data created by Time Machine.

Select one of more of these folders, typically the oldest ones, and drag them to the Trash icon on your Dock.

Empty the Trash by going to the Finder menu and selecting Empty Trash.

Sit back and wait while the Trash is emptied. You’ll be surprised how long this process takes. An even bigger surprise is that the status messages will indicate that the number of items to be deleted is a negative number. Of course this is illogical, but it will be displayed. Don’t worry about it. The deletion will eventually finish.

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Has your Time Machine backup hard drive filled up? Are you seeing the “Time Machine deleted one or more backups to make room for new backups” notification? If so, don’t worry. This is perfectly normally and is probably just fine. Let me elaborate and explain.

Let’s briefly review how Time Machine works. Let’s imagine you setup Time Machine on July 17, 2010. The first time it performs a backup it copies all files onto the external backup hard drive. This means that it copies the Mac operating system, as well as all applications and all of your photos, music, Word files, etc. Time Machine continues to automatically perform backups every hour when the Mac is on, awake and the backup hard drive is connected. These subsequent backups are much, much smaller than the initial backup. These subsequent backups only include new and edited files and are called incremental backups. Time Machine regularly prunes, or deletes, some of these small incremental backups. In other words, it doesn’t hold onto each and every hourly backup. Instead, it holds onto hourly backups for the past 24 hours, daily backups for the past month, and then weekly backups until the hard drive is full.

Once the hard drive is full, it displays a message indicating that it’s going to delete your oldest backup, from July 17, 2010 in my example. However, Time Machine is smart enough to always hold onto at least one copy of every file on your Mac. In other words, if you created a Word file named My Resume on Jan 1, 2007 and haven’t edited or opened that file since then, Time Machine backed up this file when it was initially setup. So, even though Time Machine is now deleting some backups from July 2010, it still has one copy of that Word file you created on Jan 1, 2007. Thus all of the files on your Mac are still protected (backed up). All that is being deleted are backups of files that you deleted as well as previous versions of documents that you still have. Since you only have one version of My Resume, that sole copy is retained.

If you no longer want to be notified when Time Machine deletes your oldest backups, you can turn off this feature. Go to the Apple menu, select System Preferences and then click on Time Machine. Click the Options button and uncheck the box labeled “Notify when old backups are deleted.”

If the external hard drive on which you store your Time Machine backups can only hold a few weeks worth of incremental backups before you’re notified that your oldest backups are being deleted, then I recommend that you buy an external hard drive with a larger storage capacity. If you choose to do this and want to move your existing backups to your new backup hard drive, you can copy the backups.backupdb folder as described on Apple’s web site.

Next week’s Tech Tip will cover how to manually delete your Time Machine backups from an external hard drive if Time Machine fails to do so on its own.

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Do you have duplicate or triplicate photos in your iPhoto Library? I recommend using Duplicate Annihilator to remove them.  The developer’s web site has a short movie that shows you how to use the program. It is reasonably priced at $8 for a single license or $13 if you want a Family Pack which lets you install it on as many as 5 Macs. While I trust Duplicate Annihilator, you should always make sure that you have a complete backup of your iPhoto Library before you use Duplicate Annihilator. Its default settings will not delete any photos from your iPhoto Library. Instead, it assigns the word duplicate as a comment for each duplicate photo that it identifies. By default, it uses an MD5 checksum to compare photos. This is a very effective and accurate way to compare digital fingerprints of two files to see if they are the same. Duplicate Annihilator can take several hours to scan a library with tens of thousands of photos, so be prepared for this. It displays some status indicators such as a running total of duplicates found, how many photos it has scanned, how many photos remain to be scanned and estimates how much longer the scan will take. Once the scan is complete, you can enter the word duplicate in iPhoto’s search field to locate all of the duplicates. Then you can go to the Edit menu and choose Select All to select the duplicate photos, then press the Delete key on your keyboard to put these photos into iPhotos’ Trash. Then you would need to empty iPhoto’s trash to completely delete the photos.

Important Note: Before I delete the duplicates, I like to do some random double-checking. After I’ve used iPhoto’s search feature to locate the duplicates, I write down the date of a handful of the photos. Then I clear out the search field so I can see all of my photos. After that I locate these selected photos by date to verify the photos are, indeed, duplicated. Finally, I repeat the search to locate all duplicates and delete them.

Check out Duplicate Annihilator. It can save you a lot of time when you need to eliminate duplicates in iPhoto on your Mac.

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A few months ago a representative of Stellar Data Recovery contacted me and asked if I’d be interested in reviewing their product Stellar Phoenix Macintosh, a data recovery application. I was happy to oblige. At long last, here’s my assessment.

If you’ve read many of my tech tip articles, you know that I’m a staunch advocate for setting up robust, redundant and automated data backup systems. If one has such systems in place then one’s likelihood of actually needing a tool like Stellar Phoenix Macintosh should be slim. However, the need for such tools can still arise for a myriad of reasons. Maybe one hasn’t yet copied photos from their camera’s SD storage card to their computer. Maybe one uses a USB flash drive to move files around and doesn’t backup this drive. Maybe one’s backup is misconfigured and it isn’t actually backing up an important folder. Any such drive could fail or a user could accidentally delete a file. Anybody could end up needing a data recovery tool such as Stellar Phoenix Macintosh.

Stellar Phoenix Macintosh has a simple user interface which includes buttons to recover data from various types of drives, including iPods. It also has a button dedicated to photo recovery. Within the main Drive Recovery section it provides options to try to recover deleted files, files from re-formatted drives and from drives which don’t mount. I happened to have two non-mounting drives sitting around. One was an external firewire hard drive and the other was a USB flash drive. Both were personal drives I’d used for years, but had stopped working properly in the past six months. Nothing critical was on either drive, so I had only made half-hearted attempts to figure out what was wrong with them previously. I’d been unable to get either drive to mount. Not surprisingly, Stellar Phoenix Macintosh wasn’t able to see them or recover any data from them. I didn’t really expect that it would since I suspect that there were physical problems with the drives. If I had really needed to get data from these drives I would have sent them to a professional data recovery company, like Drive Savers, which has a strong track record of being able to recover data.

Next, I took a fully-functioning external firewire drive that contained a backup copy of some of my music and movies. I put all of my files into the Trash and emptied it. Then I asked Stellar Phoenix Macintosh to try to restore the files. I used it’s Deleted File Recovery feature. I showed it the external drive and let it scan the entire 60 GB drive. Understandably, this was a time consuming process since it needed to scan every block. I don’t know how long it took since I went to bed, but I’m sure it took more than an hour. By morning it had finished, but I didn’t have time to finish restoring my files, so it conveniently let me save the scan file, presumably some sort of directory of the drive. Subsequently, I used Stellar Phoenix Macintosh’s Resume Recovery feature. This let me pick up where I left off.

Stellar Phoenix correctly listed the folders I had deleted. I started to navigate through this folder list and it correctly listed the names of sub-folders and sub-sub-folders. What annoyed me was that Stellar Phoenix’s window could not be resized. Additionally, the 3 sections within it’s window could not be resized either. This made it cumbersome to navigate through the folder hierarchy. This is a significant shortcoming of the application’s user interface. Up to this point, I had liked the interface. The buttons had been simple, well-labeled and explanations of their functions were frequently listed on screen, so it was quite jarring and annoying to suddenly realize that I couldn’t resize the window at all. However, I continued with the data restore. I selected about 10 mp3 files as well as a number of PDF documents and Microsoft Word files. I clicked the Recover button, waited a few seconds and the files were saved to a new folder on my Mac’s Desktop. I was then very disappointed when I tried to open these files and not a single one could be opened properly. I’m not sure why. Stellar Phoenix had done an admirable job of seeing the deleted files, as well as their file names and folder structure. All of this is important, but it failed in the final and most important step of successfully recovering the files.

I wanted to give Stellar Phoenix another chance so I took a healthy 1 GB USB flash drive, formatted it, copied a few files onto it and then deleted them a few minutes later. I then had Stellar Phoenix scan the drive, which took about 10 minutes. It was not able to recover the folder structure or the file names, but it did create folders for each type of file it found. In other words, it created folders for PDFs, JPEGs, Word and RTF files, for example. I then asked Stellar Phoenix to recover the files. It did so and all of the files opened properly. I was pleased with the results of this simple test. I should mention, however, that in a real world situation of recovering a few files from a hard drive that has been used for years, the inability of data recovery software to recover filenames and folder structures can mean that one could have to spend a fair amount of time locating the few desired files from a larger pile of recovered files.

In conclusion, Stellar Phoenix could be useful as a data recovery tool, certainly for recently deleted files and possibly in other situations. However, the lesson that I take away from these experiments is that data recovery is not always possible. Even when it is possible, it can be time consuming to conduct drive scans and locate the particular files you need. If you need to employ a professional data recovery service, it can be very expensive. Thus, I think it’s more prudent to setup, monitor and test robust, redundant and automated backup systems so you can hopefully avoid having to rely on data recovery products at all.

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Here are instructions on how to restore one or more files from your CrashPlan online backup archive. The instructions work for both CrashPlan and CrashPlan Pro. In my opinion, an untested backup system is next to useless. Only by testing it do you know for sure that your backup system is working properly. By testing it, you also learn how to restore a file, which will enable you to be a bit more calm in the event of an actual disaster.

If you’re a visual learner, you might like to watch my video demonstration of how to preform a restore from CrashPlan.

• Open the CrashPlan (or CrashPlan Pro) application by clicking on its icon on your Dock or in your Applications folder.
• On the left-hand side you’ll see five sections. Click on Restore.
• You’ll see the CrashPlan Central Destination listed at the top, as well as the time of the most recent backup. If you want to restore from a backup other than the most recent backup, click the words “most recent” which appear at the bottom of the window. From the calendar that appears, select a previous date and time then click “Ok.”
• Next, select the files or folders you want to restore by inserting a checkmark in the checkbox to the left of the file’s name. You can either use the search field to locate your file or you can click the arrows to the left of folder names to see the contents of the folder. Using these arrows, you can navigate down several layers of folders to locate the files or folders that you want to see.
• The files will be restored to the Desktop by default. If you prefer, you can click on the word “Desktop” near the bottom of the window to select another location.
• Finally, click the “Restore” button.
• “Restore Status” information will be listed at the bottom of the CrashPlan window. Depending upon how many Kilobytes of data you select, it can take a while for CrashPlan to retrieve the files and send them to your computer. When the restoration is complete the status message will list the time at which that the files were restored to the destination on your Mac.

It’s also possible to restore files from CrashPlan’s web site. This option could be useful if your laptop was stolen or if you’re traveling without your laptop, but need a file. Restoring files from the CrashPlan web site limits you to a maximum of 500 MB.

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Do you need to recover files that were deleted from a Mac’s hard drive? Here’s a quick overview of three options.

Option 1 – By far the easiest way to recover a file is to restore it from the most recent backup. This is why I’m such a strong proponent of setting up a comprehensive backup system including automated TimeMachine or CrashPlan backups. By default, TimeMachine runs every hour and CrashPlan runs every 15 minutes. Here are the tech tips I wrote about how to restore files from Time Machine and CrashPlan backups.

This option is appropriate for a wide range of situations including: accidentally deleting a file and realizing it a minute or a month later, suffering from a malfunctioning hard drive, losing your computer or having it stolen. Assuming that you make multiple and frequent backup copies of your data, this option has a very high recovery success rate.

This is the last of the good options. The two remaining options are either expensive, time consuming or have a much lower chance of success — or some combination thereof.

Option 2 – Use data recovery software such as ProSoft Engineering’s Data Rescue. Data Rescue and comparable applications can search a hard drive for deleted files and it can try to search a malfunctioning hard drive for files. Both of these processes can take hours to run and their success is far from guaranteed. When a file has is deleted it’s not really removed from the hard drive. Instead, the entry for that file is removed from an invisible list of all files and the space where the file resides on the hard drive is marked as available for re-use. Depending upon how much time has elapsed since the file was deleted, it may or may not have been over-written. If a hard drive is failing who knows if you’ll be able to recovery any files from it.

Option 3 – Use a professional data recovery company like DriveSavers. DriveSavers has been around since the mid 1980s. They have a stellar reputation and success rate. In the rare cases that I’ve had a client who needed professional data recovery, I’ve often used DriveSavers. They have fortunately been able to recover most of the needed data. The downside of professional data recovery companies is the relatively high cost.

In the past decade, I’ve only sent two hard drives to DriveSavers. One hard drive was from an Mac made in the mid-1990s. It hadn’t been used in years and my client suddenly realized that she needed some data from it. The hard drive no longer worked properly. She spent about $2500 to recover a few dozen files which she needed.

In the other instance, a woman phoned me after most of her iPhoto Library suddenly vanished before her eyes. She didn’t have any backup of the hard drive so we sent the hard drive to DriveSavers. She paid about $1500 for the recovery work. DriveSavers recovered thousands of jpeg photos, but some of them were random clip art files so my client then had to spend countless hours weeding through the recovered files.

In my opinion, options 2 and 3 aren’t really attractive options. They are expensive, time-consuming and the odds of getting all of the files needed are not as high as I’d like. In comparison the cost to buy a couple of backup hard drives or to pay for CrashPlan’s online backup storage system is much less. Please setup an automated, redundant and reliable backup system for your Mac.

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This Tech Tip covers provides you with instructions on how to setup and monitor Time Machine. It also explains some basic concepts behind Time Machine’s operation. Monitoring your backup system is incredibly important to do. A backup system that isn’t working is useless. Don’t simply trust or believe that your backup system is working. Check on it regularly.

Time Machine is Apple’s backup application which comes bundled with Mac OS X. It was introduced in 2007 as part of Mac OS X 10.5, Leopard. I have other Tech Tips that talk about encrypting Time Machine backups, swapping between two hard drives when using Time Machine and restoring a file from Time Machine.

Setup – Time Machine is the easiest backup application to setup. For many users it can be as easy as connecting a brand new external USB or Firewire hard drive to your Mac and turn it on. When you turn it on it’ll mount (appear) on the Desktop. Time Machine will detect this hard drive and present an on-screen message asking if you’d like to use this hard drive for storing Time Machine backups, click the “Use as backup disk” button and you’re done.

While it can be this easy, there can be complicating factors, including these:

If Time Machine has previously been configured to use some other hard drive then you’ll need to manually configure it to use this new hard drive. To accomplish this, go to the Apple menu, select System Preferences and click on Time Machine, then click the “Select Disk” button. Select the new hard drive from the list.

If the new hard drive is formatted as a PC hard drive using FAT32 or NTFS formats then Time Machine will prompt you to re-format the hard drive. I tend to buy my hard drives from Other World Computing or some other Mac-oriented vendor since their hard drives always come pre-formatted as a Mac hard drive using Mac OS Extended (Journaled). I also tend to buy hard drives with FireWire ports as opposed to only USB ports since there are often a lot of USB devices vying for the relatively few USB ports on a Mac.

Initial Backup – Once Time Machine is configured to use a particular hard drive, backups will automatically occur every hour as long as the Mac is on and awake and the selected hard drive is available. The first backup will start within two minutes of you selecting it. The first backup can take many hours but you can continue to use the computer while the backup is running. I typically start the initial Time Machine backup near the end of the day. This way it can run all night as needed.

Which files are backed up? Time Machine backs up nearly all files on your Mac. It backups all of your data files (music, email, bookmarks, photos, etc) as well as applications (Word, Safari, iTunes, etc) and Mac OS X itself. It’s useful to know that it does not backup files in the Trash. It also does not backup most cache files, log files and the iPod photo cache. You also have the ability to manually exclude a file or folder by going back to System Preferences and clicking on Time Machine, then clicking the “Options” button and adding an item to the list.

Backup Retention – After the initial backup is complete, subsequent backups only add new and/or modified files. Subsequent backups run automatically every hour, however not every backup is kept for ever. If every hourly backup was kept forever your backup hard drive would fill up very quickly. Instead, Time Machine automatically does some pruning of old backup files. Hourly backups are kept for the past 24 hours. Beyond 24 hours, daily backups are kept for one month. Beyond that, weekly backups are kept until the backup hard drive is full. Once the backup hard drive becomes full, Time Machine will notify you that it needs to delete the oldest backups in order to make room for the newest backups. I typically recommend using a backup hard drive which has at least twice the amount of storage space as you have files. For example, my laptop has about 150 GB of stuff on it. Thus, I should use a backup drive that is at least 300 GB in storage capacity.

Day-to-Day Monitoring – After you’ve setup Time Machine, the next most important task you can do is monitor Time Machine to ensure that it’s operating properly. A backup system that isn’t working is useless. To monitor Time Machine simply click on the Time Machine icon located in the upper right corner of your screen near the clock. The Time Machine icon looks like an arrow curving around in a circle with clock hands inside the circle. Click on this icon and read the first line. It should read  ”Latest Backup: Today 2:15 pm” or something similar. If your most recent backup wasn’t today then you should select “Back Up Now” from the Time Machine menu. The Time Machine menu icon should begin to spin backwards. You can then click on it to monitor the status of the backup. Commonly seen messages are Preparing, Backing up X Megabytes of XYZ Megabytes, and Cleaning Up.

If your Time Machine backup system is not working properly, the most common cause is that your backup hard drive has become disconnected or is turned off. Do you see your backup drive’s icon on the Desktop? If not, check for loose cables and to make sure that it’s turned on. Also, disconnect and then reconnect the cable which connects the hard drive to your Mac.  If you’re still not able to get the backup drive to show up then restart your Mac. Afterwards, manually start Time Machine to see if it works now. If it’s still not working, you could refer to either of the web sites I list below or contact your Mac support person for assistance.

Restore – It’s best to know how to restore a file from your Time Machine backup before a crisis hits. Thus, you should practice performing a restore in order to get comfortable with the procedure. This way you can remain calm should a crisis arise. I’ve written a separate Tech Tip about how to restore files from Time Machine.

Apple’s introduction to setting up, restoring from and troubleshooting Time Machine.

Mr. Pondini has created a very thorough web site about Time Machine, including extensive Frequently Asked Questions and Troubleshooting sections.

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Is your Time Capsule full? Would you like to free up some room for either newer backups of your data or to add another computer in your home? If so, here are some instructions on  this process.

[Note: You need to be comfortable using Terminal and issuing some basic Unix commands in order to free up storage space. You can really mess things up if you use Terminal and are not sure what you're doing, so hire a consultant if you're unsure.]

Time Machine uses different methods for storing data on local (USB or Firewire) hard drives versus the hard drive in a Time Capsule. On a Time Capsule hard drive, Time Machine stores your backup files in a special type of disk image known as a sparsebundle. You don’t need to know what a sparsebundle is, but it’s important to understand that it has important implications when it comes to freeing up space on a Time Capsule hard drive.

On a local hard drive, if you want to delete some of the backup data, you open Time Machine and select the date of a particular backup. Then, click on the Action menu icon, which looks like a gear in the Finder window, and select Delete Backup. Time Machine will proceed to delete the files in that particular backup and this will free up space on the local hard drive.

On a Time Capsule hard drive, when you follow this same procedure to delete the files in a particular backup, you don’t free up storage space on the Time Capsule since the sparsebundle disk image does not change in size. To reclaim the storage space you need to issue a command to shrink the sparsebundle disk image. Here are the steps:

• Open the Terminal application and type cd /Volumes/
• Select your Time Capsule hard drive and navigate into its subdirectories to find the correct .sparsebundle file. The sparsebundle file will have the general form of ComputerName MACaddress.sparsebundle. Write down the name of this file, as you’ll need it in a second.
• Type the following command in Terminal: hdiutil compact SparsebundleName.sparsebundle
• Now sit back and wait. Depending upon how many backups you deleted and how large your sparsebundle was when you started, this compacting could take anywhere from a few minutes to overnight.

When the compacting is complete you’ll see that you have more storage space available on your Time Capsule.

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Would you like to secure your Time Machine backup data so other people wouldn’t be able to view your files in case your backup drive fell into the wrong hands? Apple doesn’t provide a built-in way to encrypt your Time Machine backup files, but it can be done. A clever individual named Jay has figured out how to do it and has the best documentation that I could find on how to setup encrypted Time Machine backups. Thanks Jay. [Update, Fall 2011: Mac OS X Lion's version of Time Machine now includes a built-in way to encrypt a backup hard drive and its contents. Turning on encryption is now as easy as checking a box in Time Machine Preferences. If your backup drive is empty then the drive can be encrypted in about a minute. If the backup drive already has data on it then it can take many hours to encrypt the entire drive.]

In previous Tech Tips, I’ve written about how useful Time Machine can be as well as how to setup Time Machine and test your Time Machine backups. Apple got a lot of things right when they created Time Machine. It’s by far the easiest backup system to setup, monitor and use to restore a file. Having said that, it does have some short-comings including the fact that it doesn’t let you automatically switch between multiple hard drives and doesn’t let you encrypt your backup data. I describe how to manually switch between drives but Jay offers a way to automate the process. I haven’t tested his method myself but I have successfully setup encrypted Time Machine backups.

Jay provides excellent step-by-step setup instructions but here’s a quick overview.

You obviously need an external hard drive on which Time Machine will store the encrypted data. (Time Machine comes with Mac OS X 10.5 or newer.) Next, you use Disk Utility to create an appropriately named encrypted sparse bundle disk image which you put on the external hard drive. Save the password for your disk image and then move this saved password from your own Login keychain to the System keychain. The disk image then needs to be tweaked slightly so Time Machine will be able to figure out that it can store your data in it. This is accomplished by creating a custom preference (plist) file and putting this plist file into your Disk Image. Finally, select the external hard drive in Time Machine Preferences and Time Machine will magically store the backup data inside the disk image.

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Update January 2012: CrashPlan no longer offers the Pro Hosted Client Subscription Service. This has been supplanted by CrashPlanPro. This is a great development since CrashPlan Pro is much easier to setup and use. Please ignore the old tech tip below.

In this Tech Tip article, I’ll tell you how to setup CrashPlan’s Pro Hosted Client Subscription Service to perform automated, off-site versioned backups. I use this service to backup my work laptop. In my previous Tech Tip on setting up a comprehensive backup system, I mention how CrashPlan can be a nice supplement to backing up your Mac to an external hard drive using Time Machine and Carbon Copy Cloner since CrashPlan’s backup data can be stored off-site on CrashPlan’s servers. Thus, it can provide automated, off-site backups of your business data.

In another recent Tech Tip I talk about how to use CrashPlan+ to backup personal data so if you’re not backing up business data you’ll probably prefer to sign-up for the less-expensive CrashPlan+ service which offers the same set of features. That article includes definitions of CrashPlan, CrashPlan+ and CrashPlan Central so if you’re not familiar with the differences between these terms please read this part of the article now.

One important detail to know is that CrashPlan’s does not mention this Pro Hosted Client Subscription Service by name and barely mentions that a hosted service is available. In fact, I was confused after reading the CrashPlan web site and trying to understand the proper way to use CrashPlan+ to backup business data. I only learned about the Pro Hosted Client Subscription Service by exchanging emails with Code42′s tech support team. I was informed that CrashPlan will be revising their web site to offer a better explanation of the range of services that they offer. In the meantime, here’s my abbreviated explanation.

CrashPlan, the application, can be used to backup either personal or business data to local hard drives, hard drives connected to your friend’s computer at their home or office, or hard drives connected to other computers on your own network. However, neither CrashPlan nor CrashPlan+ allow you to backup business data to CrashPlan Central, Code42′s servers kept in a secure data center. I value having a reliable, redundant backup system and I want my data to be secure so I really like the idea of storing my backup data on the CrashPlan Central servers. So, if you’re a business owner and you want to backup your business data to the CrashPlan Central servers then you need to sign up for either CrashPlan Pro or the Hosted Pro Client Subscription Service (contact info listed below). CrashPlan Pro is advertised as supporting 10-10,000 computers, but technically it could be used for any number of business computers. It just isn’t cost-effective until you have about 10 computers. It seems that Code42 setup their Hosted Pro Client Subscription Service as a bit of an after thought to plug the gap in their service offerings and to give business owners with 1-5 computers a way to more affordably store their data on the CrashPlan Central servers.

If the Pro Hosted Client Subscription Service is a good fit for your small business then here’s some guidance on how to set it up.

Contact Code42′s sales team at sales@crashplanpro.com and ask them about the Pro Hosted Client Subscription Service.

Fill-in and return the Pro Hosted Order form that is sent to you by the sales team. Read the pricing examples that I provide at the bottom of this article.

You’ll be notified of your login information once your account has been setup.

Download and install the CrashPlan Pro application. It works on PowerPC and Intel-based Macs running OS X 10.4.11 or higher.

Open CrashPlan Pro. When you’re prompted to login do so using the account information you were given.

On the left-hand side click on the Backup button. Look at the section labeled “File to  Back Up”. By default it’s set to backup your Home folder. This folder is the default location for all of your music, pictures, documents, local email messages and files on your Desktop. This is typically what I recommend you back up. However, if you want to make changes to add or remove folders click the button which should be labeled Change or Change File Section.

Once you’ve selected the files you want to backup then again click on Backup on the left-hand side. Then, in the Backup Destinations section locate “CrashPlan Central” and click the Start Backup button. The backup will start. That’s it. You’re up and running!

Remember this initial back up could take days or weeks to complete depending upon how much data you’ve selected and the speed of your Internet connection. Until this initial backup is complete you don’t have much protection. So, I’ll reiterate that I think CrashPlan is a nice supplemental backup to local backups performed by Time Machine and Carbon Copy Cloner. CrashPlan offers some redundant protection and off-site protection which is very important to have if you only backup to one hard drive using Time Machine and Carbon Copy Cloner. CrashPlan is also very useful if you travel and take your laptop with you since CrashPlan will run anytime your Mac has an Internet connection.

You can quit the CrashPlan application and the backups will continue since CrashPlan is made up of two parts. There is the CrashPlan application which you use to configure the backups. The other part is the CrashPlan Engine, which runs quietly, unseen, in the back-ground. CrashPlan’s Engine automatically adjusts how much of your computer’s processing power and your network’s capacity it uses based on whether or not you’re using your computer. You can view and adjust these values in the Settings section of CrashPlan. Also in Settings you can adjust how long versions of files are retained and your can setup files or folders to exclude from your backup data using file names or regular expressions. You can also adjust the frequency and types of email notifications which you receive.
By default, CrashPlan will send you email notices when it hasn’t been able to backup your Mac in XX days and it’ll also send you a weekly summary of when the last backup occurred. You can change these email notification schedules in the Settings section.

As with any backup application. I recommend that you perform test file restorations regularly to ensure that the backup system is working properly and so that you’re comfortable performing restores so you can do it with confidence with disaster strikes.

On the left-hand side click on the Backup button. Look at the section labeled “File to  Back Up”. By default it’s set to backup your Home folder. This folder is the default location for all of your music, pictures, documents, local email messages and files on your Desktop. This is typically what I recommend you back up. However, if you want to make changes to add or remove folders click the button which should be labeled Change or Change File Section.

Once you’ve selected the files you want to backup then again click on Backup on the left-hand side and click the Start Backup button. The backup will start. That’s it. You’re up and running!

Remember this initial back up could take days or weeks to complete depending upon how much data you’ve selected and the speed of your Internet connection. Until this initial backup is complete you don’t have much protection. So, I’ll reiterate that I think CrashPlan Pro is a nice supplemental backup to local backups performed by Time Machine and Carbon Copy Cloner. CrashPlan Pro offers some redundant protection and off-site protection which is very important to have if you only backup to one hard drive using Time Machine and Carbon Copy Cloner. CrashPlan Pro is also very useful if you travel and take your laptop with you since CrashPlan Pro will run anytime your Mac has an Internet connection.

You can quit the CrashPlan Pro application and the backups will continue since CrashPlan Pro is made up of two parts. There is the CrashPlan Pro application which you use to configure the backups. The other part is the CrashPlan Engine, which runs quietly, unseen, in the back-ground. CrashPlan’s Engine automatically adjusts how much of your computer’s processing power and your network’s capacity it uses based on whether or not you’re using your computer. You can view and adjust these values in the Settings section of CrashPlan Pro. Also in Settings you can adjust how long versions of files are retained and your can setup files or folders to exclude from your backup data using file names or regular expressions. You can also adjust the frequency and types of email notifications which you receive.

By default, CrashPlan Pro will send you email notices when it hasn’t been able to backup your Mac in XX days and it’ll also send you a weekly summary of when the last backup occurred. You can change these email notification schedules in the Settings section.

As with any backup application. I recommend that you perform test file restorations regularly to ensure that the backup system is working properly and so that you’re comfortable performing restores so you can do it with confidence with disaster strikes.

Pricing Example – As of the November 2010 the cost is $5/computer/month plus 30 cents per gigabyte per month with a minimum of 50 GB. Thus, for one computer the cost would be $20/month ($5 for the computer and $15 for upto 50 GB of storage).

The cost for 4 computers would be a minimum of $35/month ($20 for 4 computers and $15 for upto 50 GB of storage). $35/month x 12 mns = $420 per year each year.

Here’s a cost example in case you need more then 50 GB of storage space.

4 computers = $20/month

initial 50 GB of storage space = $15/month

additional 20 GB of storage space = $6/month

Total is $20 + $15 + $6 = $41/month    12 months x $41 = $492/year

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Here are some safety tips on protecting digital images. The tips come from one of DriveSavers’s recent newsletters. DriveSavers is a top tier data recovery company.

With the advent of digital photography and flash memory, a whole new set of potential problems has evolved for photographers. DriveSavers Data Recovery Engineer, Chris Bross, has assembled the following list of tips on how to handle flash memory cards properly and help prevent the potential loss of precious photographs.

Protect Your Flash Memory Cards - Use the plastic holder when carrying them around. Simple static buildup can zap the card and make it unreadable. There are other dangers as well, such as breaking a card in your pocket or putting the card, along with your clothing, in the wash.

Avoid Extreme Temperatures - Heat, cold and humidity can wreak havoc with digital equipment, especially flash memory.

Replace Your Flash Memory Cards - Typically, flash memory cards can be used about 1,000 times before they start to wear out.

Transfer Your Photos - Copy the image files from the camera’s flash memory to a computer’s hard drive a soon as you can. We recommend not deleting images or reformatting the memory card while it is still in the camera. Wait until all photos are transferred and verified.

Verify the Transfer – Open the images on the hard drive before reformatting the card.

Back Up Your Images – Protect yourself and your irreplaceable images by backing up onto CD, DVDs, tapes, online storage or an external hard drive. This will help guard against data loss when (not if) your hard drive crashes unexpectedly.

Make More then One Backup Copy – Back up your backup media and keep a duplicate offsite in a secure location.

Follow Instructions – Take care when removing flash memory from the camera or card reader. Avoid deleting or corrupting images by using the eject command on the computer or moving the card icon from the desktop to the trash/recycle bin before physically removing the card.

[Excerpt information from Drive Savers newsletter, © 2011 DriveSavers Data Recovery, Inc.]

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If you need to recover digital photos from your camera’s compact flash (CF) or secure digital (SD) card you should know about Glazer’s Camera’s data recovery services.

Recently, a client needed this service. Glazer’s was able to recover over 1200 RAW and JPEG images from 3 CF cards which my client had erased (reformatted) in her camera. My client had already copied the RAW and JPEG images onto an external hard drive but they mysteriously disappeared. Upon discovering that the images were not on the external hard drive, I recommended a professional data recovery service which would have cost hundreds of dollars. A friend of my client came up with a faster and much less costly option.

My client took her CF cards to Glazer’s where they were able to successfully recover all of the missing images. They charged $30 per card and then copied the recovered images onto her external hard drive. So, if you live in the greater Seattle area and you ever need this service, keep Glazer’s in mind. Of course, to reduce the likelihood that you ever need this service please follow these tips for protecting digital images provided by DriveSavers in one of their recent newsletters.

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Update Jan 2011: In December 2010, CrashPlan released CrashPlan version 3 which added new features like the ability to backup different files to different destinations. More importantly, it rolled the CrashPlan+ features of backups running every 15 minutes and storing multiple versions of files into the standard CrashPlan application. Thus, these two features are now standard for all users of CrashPlan.

Update March 2013: Pricing and product structure updates from CrashPlan are now correct in this article.

In my Tech Tip on how to setup a comprehensive backup system I mention that CrashPlan can be a nice supplement to an external hard drive using Time Machine and Carbon Copy Cloner for backing up your Mac since CrashPlan’s backup data can be stored off-site on CrashPlan’s servers. Thus, it can provide automated, off-site backups of your personal data. In this article, I provide instructions on how to setup CrashPlan to perform automated, off-site, versioned backups.

I need to start by introducing and defining a few terms.

CrashPlan is the name of a backup application made by Code42 Software. It’s free for personal use and can be used to backup data to a locally connected hard drive, to another computer in your home or to another computer at your friend’s home. CrashPlan+ comes in three sizes: 10GB, Unlimited and Family Unlimited. It allows off-site backup to the CrashPlan Central servers in addition to other computers. With CrashPlan+, backups occur continuously as files change and you can configure CrashPlan to hold onto previous versions of files for a while or forever.

It’s important to know that CrashPlan is free for personal use by residential customers. That is, you’re allowed to use it to backup only personal data, not business data. If you’re a business customer then you should buy CrashPlanPro. This allows you to backup your business data to local hard drives or other computers owned by you or your friends as well as CrashPlan Central.

Setup Instructions

Start by going to CrashPlan’s web store and purchasing a license for CrashPlan+ as either an Individual Unlimited Plan ($60) or a Family Unlimited Plan ($150). The individual plan provides unlimited storage for one computer online. The family plan provides unlimited storage for all computers in one household online. When you finish the checkout procedure you’ll receive an email which contains your license code for CrashPlan+.

Download the free CrashPlan application. It works on PowerPC Macs as well as Intel Macs running Mac OS X 10.5 or higher. These requirements may change over time to be sure to check CrashPlan’s web site for current requirements.

Open CrashPlan. You’ll be prompted to enter your user account information. You don’t have an account yet so follow the instructions to setup an account.

Once you’ve setup your account then the CrashPlan application will open.

On the left-hand side click on the Backup button. Look at the section labeled “File to Back Up.” By default it’s set to backup your Home folder. This folder is the default location for all of your music, pictures, documents, local email messages and files on your Desktop. This is typically what I recommend you back up. However, if you want to make changes to add or remove folders, click the button which should be labeled Change or Change File Section.

Once you’ve selected the files you want to backup then click on Backup on the left-hand side. In the Backup Destinations section locate “CrashPlan Central” and click the Start Backup button. The backup will start. That’s it. You’re up and running!

Remember, this initial back up could take days or weeks to complete depending upon how much data you’ve selected and the speed of your Internet connection. Until this initial backup is complete you don’t have much protection, so I’ll reiterate that I think CrashPlan is a nice supplemental backup to local backups performed by Time Machine and Carbon Copy Cloner. CrashPlan offers some redundant protection and off-site protection, which is very important to have if you only backup to one hard drive using Time Machine and Carbon Copy Cloner. CrashPlan is also very useful if you travel and take your laptop with you since CrashPlan will run anytime your Mac has an Internet connection.

You can quit the CrashPlan application and backups will continue since CrashPlan is made up of two parts. There is the CrashPlan application, which you use to configure the backups, and CrashPlan Engine, which runs quietly, unseen, in the background. CrashPlan’s Engine automatically adjusts how much of your computer’s processing power and your network’s capacity it uses based on whether or not you’re using your computer. You can view and adjust these values in the Settings section of CrashPlan. Also in Settings, you can adjust how long versions of files are retained and your can setup files or folders to exclude from your backup data using file names or regular expressions. You can also adjust the frequency and types of email notifications which you receive.

By default, CrashPlan will send you email notices when it hasn’t been able to backup your Mac in 3 days and it’ll also send you a weekly summary of when the last backup occurred. You can change these email notification schedules in the Settings section.

As with any backup application, I recommend that you perform test file restorations regularly to ensure that the backup system is working properly and so that you’re comfortable performing restores so you can do it with confidence with disaster strikes.

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Testing your backup system is a critical, but often over-looked task. You need to monitor and test your backup system not only so you know that it’s properly copying your files, but more importantly so you learn how to use your backup system to retrieve a file. By practicing, you’ll be confident and ready when disaster strikes and you need to restore a file.

Time Machine is the easiest, most user-friendly backup program for restoring a file. Here are simple instructions, tested on Mac OS X 10.5 and 10.6, for restoring a file from Time Machine. We’ll imagine that you accidentally deleted a file named My Resume.doc from your Documents folder.

• Click on the Finder icon on your Dock. This will open a Finder window.
• Navigate to your Documents folder.
• Open Time Machine. You can either click on the Time Machine icon in your menu bar and select “Enter Time Machine” or go to your Applications folder and double-click on Time Machine.
• Time Machine’s interface is a star field with a stack of windows disappearing into infinity. On the right-hand edge of the screen, you’ll see a time line. Each of the hash marks corresponds to a different backup copy.
• On the right-hand time line, click on the date and time from which you want to restore your My Resume.doc file.
• You’ll see the top windows in the stack whisk by as Time Machine goes back to the date you selected. Notice that the date and time listed below the Documents window corresponds to the date and time you selected. You’re now looking at your Documents folder the way it looked at that point in the past!
• These windows behave like regular Finder windows. You can navigate around in them or use the search field. You can preview a file by double-clicking it. Click on your My Resume.doc file in your Documents folder to select it. (You can even select an entire folder or hold down the Command key and select multiple files or folders as well.)
• Click the Restore button in the lower right corner. If the name of the file you are restoring matches the name of a file currently stored in the same location, your Documents folder in this case, then Time Machine will ask you if you want to keep either the original item, the restored item or both.
• Your My Resume.doc file will be restored to your Documents folder.

Apple has written similar instructions on how to restore an individual file as well as how to restore your entire hard drive. They also provide an overview of Time Machine.

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Monitoring and testing a backup system are two critically important steps which many people skip. If you don’t consistently monitor and periodically test your backup system, you could be in for a big surprise when disaster strikes and you try to retrieve files from your backup system. Monitoring and testing gives you confidence that your backup is running properly.

In my Tech Tip about setting up a comprehensive Macintosh backup system, I encourage everybody to setup both Time Machine and Copy Copy Cloner. Here are simple instructions to ensure that Carbon Copy Cloner is creating a full, bootable backup copy of your Mac’s hard drive:

• Quit all open applications except Finder.
• Go to the Apple menu and select Restart.
• Immediately after you hear the startup chime hold down the Option key.
• After 10-15 seconds the “Startup Manager” will appear. The Startup Manager will display a row of icons on a blue background. You can release the Option key.
• Once your cursor becomes an arrow, click on the hard drive icon for your full bootable backup made by Carbon Copy Cloner to select it. In these instructions I’ll assume your full bootable backup is named “Full Bootable Backup.” If you don’t see your full bootable backup drive listed in Startup Manager, that is an indication that your full bootable backup didn’t work properly. In this case follow the instructions I list in this Tech Tip about setting up Carbon Copy Cloner.
• Next, click the button with an arrow pointing to the right to tell the computer to continue to start up.
• Once the computer has started up go to the Apple menu and select About This Mac. In the section labeled Startup Disk you should see Full Bootable Backup listed. If you see Macintosh HD listed then the full backup didn’t work properly since the Mac failed to startup from the full bootable backup. In this case follow the instructions I list in this Tech Tip about setting up Carbon Copy Cloner.
• Close the About this Mac window.
• Now test a few important files. For example open some important word processing files. Open iTunes and verify that you can play some songs. Open iPhoto and ensure that your photos are there.

You’ve successfully tested your full, bootable backup made by Carbon Copy Cloner!

The final step is to have your Mac startup from its internal hard drive as it does typically. Go to the Apple menu and select Restart. Let your Mac startup and it’ll automatically revert to starting from its internal hard drive. Once it’s started you can verify this fact by going to the Apple menu, selecting “About This Mac” and seeing which hard drive is listed as the startup disk.

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Update Oct 2010 – Backing up to multiple hard drives is easier to setup if your Mac has Mac OS Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8.x) installed.  One no longer has to go through the rigamarole that I describe below when you swap between two or more hard drives. Instead, Time Machine will remember that you want it to be ready to backup to two or more hard drives. When you swap the hard drives it will automatically start to backup to the hard drive that you just attached. It’s easy to configure Time Machine to backup to multiple drives. Read this article from MacObserver for instructions.

Here are instructions on how to have Time Machine switch between two backup hard drives.

My recommendations for setting up a comprehensive backup system for your Mac include swapping between two external hard drives. While one hard drive is being used to backup your Mac the other drive is kept off-site in a secure location. Using multiple drives provides protection against fire, floods and burglars, which could affect both your Mac and the backup drive sitting next to it.

In last week’s Tech Tip article, I described how to configure Carbon Copy Cloner to perform a full bootable backup whenever the backup drive is reconnected. If you swap your two backup drives on a weekly basis then Carbon Copy Cloner will automatically update it’s full backup each week. In other words, Carbon Copy Cloner can be configured to backup to multiple drives. On the other hand, Time Machine can not be configured to backup to multiple drives. Instead, each time you switch your hard drives you’ll need to manually select the currently attached drive and configure Time Machine to use it.  The good news is that Time Machine will look at the attached hard drive and see that it has stored backup data on this drive previously and will pick up where it left off. It’s important to understand how Time Machine performs its backups.

Time Machine performs automatic incremental updates. Time Machine is scheduled to run automatically every hour as long your Mac is turned on and awake. The first time it performs a backup it can take many hours since it is backing up all files on your Mac. It actually skips some files including items in the Trash, cache files, log files and a few other files. Subsequent backups take much less time since Time Machine only needs to backup modified and new files. It’s also useful to know that Time Machine doesn’t hold onto every hourly backup forever. It performs some automatic deleting of backups. It saves hourly backups for the last 24 hours. Beyond that it saves daily backups for the past month and weekly backups until your hard drive is full. Once a backup drive becomes full then it deletes the oldest weekly backups to make room for new backups and notifies you when it does this.

When you swap backup drives, Time Machine performs a scan to determine what files are new or have been modified since the last time Time Machine performed a backup to a particular drive. In our case, when you swap the drives, the most recent backup would be about a week ago. Time Machine thus performs an incremental backup of all files that are new or have been modified during the past week.

Specifically, here are instructions on how to re-configure Time Machine each time you swap your backup drives. Let’s assume you have two backup hard drives named “Time Machine Red” and “Time Machine Green”. For simplicity, I’ll just call them Red and Green.

1. Let’s assume that Green is currently connected to your Mac. In this case, you’ll see an icon named “Time Machine Green” on your Desktop.
2. Drag this icon to the Trash this tells the Mac to unmount (logically disconnect) the hard drive.
3. It’s now safe to physically disconnect the hard drive from your Mac. Unplug the FireWire or USB cable and power cord, if present, from Green.
4. Connect the power cord, as needed, and FireWire or USB cable to Red.
5. In about 15 seconds you’ll see an icon appear on the Desktop named Time Machine Red. (If your drive is partitioned for use with Carbon Copy Cloner then you’ll see two icons, one for each partition.)
6. Go to the Apple Menu, select System Preferences and click on the Time Machine icon.
7. Click Select Disk
8. Select Time Machine Red from the list of available hard drives.
9. Click the “Use for Backup” button
10. Close the Time Machine Preferences window. Time Machine will start to perform its backup shortly.

Whenever  you swap between Red and Green simply follow these same instructions but replace every occurrence of Red with Green and vice versa. Once you’ve done the swaps a couple of times you’ll see that there’s nothing to it.

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In a previous Tech Tip article I encouraged users to setup a comprehensive backup system by partitioning a hard drive into two pieces and then configure Carbon Copy Cloner and Time Machine to  backup to the two partitions. Here are some more detailed setup instructions.

Connect a FireWire or USB hard drive to your Mac with a cable, turn it on and wait for its icon to mount on the Desktop. Go to /Application/Utilities and open Disk Utility. Select the hard drive from the left-hand list. The hard drive is typically named by its size, manufacturer and sometimes a model number. (In the image below you can see that I’ve select the drive named 750.16 GB OEM.)

Paritioning in Disk Utility

Next, click the Partition tab. In the Volume Scheme section select 2 Partitions. Fill in appropriate names and sizes in the fields on the right-hand side. I recommend making the first (top) partition your partition for storing Time Machine backup data and the second (bottom) partition your partition for storing your Carbon Copy Cloner full bootable backup. The reason for putting the Time Machine partition on top is so that you can more easily make the second partition larger, as needed, in the future.

To determine appropriate sizes you should click on your Mac’s hard drive icon on your Desktop. Then go the File menu and select Get Info. Look at how much space, measured in gigabytes (GB) is being used and look at the drive’s total capacity. At a minimum the size for your Carbon Copy Cloner partition needs to be large equal to the number of gigabytes currently used. I typically make the partition at least 10-20% bigger to allow for growth in the amount of data on your hard drive.

I suggest naming the partitions something like Time Machine Backup and Full Backup. If you’re going to follow my recommendation and switch between two backup hard drives then you should add letter or number designators in the partition names, such as Time Machine Backup A.

Set the Format to Mac OS Extended (Journaled).

Click the Options button and make sure you select GUID Partition Table if the drive is connected to a Mac with an Intel processor. Select Apple Partition Map if the drive is connected to a older Mac using a PowerPC G4 or G5 processor. Click the Apply button so the drive will be partitioned and then formatted. When Disk Utility finishes the drive is now ready for use. If my instructions are too brief, you might benefit from Ken Stone’s detailed instructions with lots of pictures.

Two icons representing the two hard drive partitions will appear on your Mac’s Desktop. Go to the Apple Menu, select System Preferences and click on the Time Machine icon (Mac OS X 10.5 or newer is required). Click the Select Disk button and pick your Time Machine and then click the Use for Backup button. Apple offers a succinct introduction to using Time Machine.

After you download and install Carbon Copy Cloner, open it from your Applications folder. In the Source Disk section select your Mac’s internal hard drive which is typically named Macintosh HD. In the Target Disk section select the smaller partition which you created in Disk Utility. Click the padlock icon in the lower left corner and enter your Mac OS X administrator password, then click the Save Task button. In the Scheduler window that appears enter a name for the task in the Scheduled Tasks section. On the right-hand side, in the “Run this task:” section select “When Target  is Reconnected.” Click the Save button in the lower right corner to save this configuration. The developer offers lots of support and instructions for Carbon Copy Cloner.

Carbon Copy Cloner

You have now partitioned an external hard drive and configured Time Machine and Carbon Copy Cloner to backup to each of the partitions. If you follow my recommendation of buying two external backup hard drives then you’ll want to repeat this setup procedure for the second drive. Next week I’ll provide instructions on how to swap between two hard drives and have Time Machine backup to both hard drives.

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Are you considering an online backup system? Here’s an overview of the pros and cons of such systems.

Before we review the pros and cons, one has to initially be open to the idea of having a copy of their personal data stored on a relatively unknown company’s server. Thus there is an issue of trust. Who is this company? How do I know that the workers aren’t looking at my data? Companies which offer online backup services understand these concerns and address them by storing your backup data in an encrypted manner. The encryption key used to secure your data is randomly generated based on the password to your account. This means that nobody else is able to view the contents of your backup data.

The biggest advantages of online backups is that you end up with an off-site backup copy of your data and that the backups can run automatically. This means that if your Mac and any local backup copies sitting next to your Mac were destroyed by a fire or stolen by burglars, then you could retrieve a recent copy of your data from the online backup system. This is great. However, once you learn how long it would take to download gigabytes of music files, photos and word processing documents, then you’d see one of the disadvantage of online backup systems. They are slow. Depending upon how much data you want to backup to an online backup system, it could literally take days or weeks to copy it since the speed of Internet connections in homes and businesses are slow compared to the copying data onto a USB or FireWire hard drive. Let me illustrate this. I had a client with 16 GB of data. This data could be backed up to an external FireWire drive in about 15 minutes. Copying this same data to an online backup service took about 4 days.

As a consequence of their slowness, I tend to recommend only backing up part of your Mac’s hard drive not the entire thing. More specifically, I recommend only backing up your Home folder since it contains all of your personal data. Don’t bother backing up your applications and the folders containing the Mac operating system. I do believe in backing up everything on your hard drive, just not using an online backup system. Instead, one should use something like Carbon Copy Cloner to make a full bootable backup. For more details read my Tech Tip about setting up comprehensive backup systems. Adding an online backup adds redundancy to your backup system. If one of your backup systems, like Time Machine, were to stop working and you didn’t notice it for a few days, it would be very nice to know that your automated online backup system was still doing its job.

I should also mention that online backup systems can be quite affordable. I tend to recommend CrashPlan to people who want to setup online backup systems. For $60 CrashPlan provides you with unlimited storage space on their servers for backups or personal data on one computer for one year. Or, one can buy a Family Plan for $150 which provides unlimited storage space for all computers in your household for one year. The pricing for backing up business data on buisness computer is a bit more complex. In the coming weeks, I’ll write a Tech Tip which discusses CrashPlan in more detail.

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The focus of this article is to describe the essential components of a comprehensive backup system for your Macintosh computer. This article’s recommendations are appropriate for anybody with between one and a few Macs which they would like to backup. If you have a larger network of Macs, then other applications and approaches would be more appropriate.

I believe that there are two types of people in this world. Those who have lost data and those who will lose data. Thus, I feel strongly about the importance of backing up your computer. A comprehensive backup system will help you minimize the amount of data that you could ever lose.

We all store valuable files on our computer, though what is valuable varies by person. For some it is email messages, calendar data and address book information. For others it is their Quicken or QuickBooks information. For others still it is their digital pictures, home movies and music. For some it is all of these kinds of files. We increasingly rely on computers, so minimizing downtime and recovering quickly from problems need to be incorporated into a comprehensive backup system.

In some ways, a backup system is analogous to an insurance policy. We hope we never need to rely on it, but we’re very glad that we have it if it is needed. Just as different types of insurance policies provide different amounts of coverage, not all backup systems provide the same levels of protection. However, any level of protection is better then no protection at all. Here is a list of the essential components in a comprehensive backup system.

• It should backup all files on your computer
• It should run frequently and automatically
• It should produce multiple backup copies of your files. The old rule of thumb is that if it’s important enough to backup once then it’s important enough to backup twice.
  
• The multiple copies should be kept on multiple disks which are securely stored in multiple locations. One of these locations should be off-site or, if on-site, in a Class 125 fireproof safe.
  
• You need to monitor the backup system at least weekly to ensure that it is making backup copies of your data.
  
• You need to test your backup system a few times each year to ensure that it’s working properly and so you’ll know how to use it to restore a file under pressure when a problem arises.

The Tao of Backup web site does a very good job of describing the importance of each of these components in an entertaining and educational way.

Backup systems allow us to recover from a range of problems that can occur. The most common type of problem is accidentally deleting a file and needing to get it back. Another all to common problem is hard drive failure, in which case we’d need to recover all files. Although rare, burglaries, fire, flood and theft all occur and would require us to recover all of our files too. To recover an accidentally deleted file or to recover from a hard drive failure all one needs is a local, on-site backup copy of their files. However, to recover from a burglary, fire or flood can often require having an off-site backup copy of your data.

While I encourage everybody to setup a comprehensive backup system, I understand that not everybody has the time or money to commit to such a system. I’ll re-iterate that any level of protection is better than none at all and a pretty good backup can be surprisingly affordable.

In more practical terms, here is a simple, comprehensive backup system for one Mac. Start by purchasing two external hard drives. Partition each drive into two parts. Configure Carbon Copy Cloner (donations requested) to make a full bootable backup of your Mac to one of the partitions on each of the external drives. Carbon Copy Cloner can be scheduled to perform automatic backups whenever the hard drive is connected. Configure Time Machine, which comes included in Mac OS X 10.5 and higher, to perform automated hourly backups of all files on your Mac to the other partition on each of the external drives. On a designated day each week you can switch between the two hard drives. The idle drive should be stored off-site at a secure location across the street or across town. If you’re not inclined to buy two backup hard drives then you could supplement your one on-site hard drive with off-site backups made by CrashPlan. CrashPlan is an online backup system. They have different pricing for personal and business use. (I’ve now written Tech Tip articles about using CrashPlan for either personal or business use.)

The reason to use both Carbon Copy Cloner and Time Machine is that even though Time Machine backs up all files on a hard drive, it does not do so in a manner which lets one start (boot) their Mac from the Time Machine backup drive. Thus, Carbon Copy Cloner is a nice supplement to Time Machine since it’s focus is making a bootable backup drive. Having another hard drive from which one can boot their Mac can minimize downtime and can be helpful in the event of problem with the internal hard drive.

Monitoring the system is easy. To monitor Time Machine simply click on its Menu Bar icon to see when it last ran and/or look for its Menu Bar icon to spin while it is performing a backup. When you swap the backup drives you should see Carbon Copy Cloner automatically start.

Apple has an article which provides instructions on how to restore files from a Time Machine backup. Practice this a few times so you have confidence that Time Machine is working and so you’ll be calm if you need to rely on Time Machine for real. An important test of the Carbon Copy Cloner backup is to go to the Startup Disk System Preference, select this disk and then restart your Mac to ensure that you can boot from this backup. To determine which drive was used to startup your Mac, go to the Apple menu, select About This Mac and see which disk is listed as the startup disk or use Disk Utility.

A few final notes. Archives are different from backups and I think you should archive your more important data as well. I’ll talk about archives in a future article.

TidBits’ has written a couple of excellent Take Control PDF books about backing up Macs. Check them out:

Take Control of Mac Backups and Take Control of Easy Mac Backups

This article is the first in a series of articles that talk about Macintosh backup systems including specific products. Check my Tech Tip blog regularly for more articles in my Backup category.

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[Update 2012: In case you haven't backed up your Entourage database, I just learned about a third party data recovery product, Stellar Phoenix Entourage Recovery. It claims to be able to recover email messages and other types of data from damaged Entourage databases. I haven't personally used this product but it's made by Stellar Phoenix and I tested and reviewed one of their other data recovery products previously. Colleagues have reported having success using it. A demo version with limited capabilities is available. The full version costs $149 currently.]

If you use Entourage 2004 or 2008, I believe that it’s critically important that you backup your Entourage database daily or even more often.

Entourage stores all of your email messages, calendar events and address book contacts in the database file. As this database file gets larger it becomes more and more prone to getting damaged. Some damage can be repaired, but it’s not uncommon for some databases to be damaged beyond repair. At this point there are typically only two ways to deal with the situation. The first option is to manually rebuild your database which is very time consuming and almost certainly ensures that some email messages or other data will be lost. This process requires you to manually export your address book, calendar events and then export each mail folder one by one into individual mailboxes (mbox). The second option is to restore your Entourage database from a recent backup. Your backup copy of  your Entourage database will still be large and in need of some housekeeping, but hopefully its not damaged so you can do this clean-up and avoid future problems. The more frequent your backups the better since we want to work with a recent database.

I should also emphasize that it’s important to deal with a damaged Entourage database at the earliest sign of problems. In some cases Entourage will display a message indicating that your database is damaged. In other situations you’ll notice problems. Entourage might display multiple copies of the same email message in your inbox. Or, it might display the header information for one email message while displaying the body of a different email message.

You can manually start Entourage’s built-in Database Utility by holding down the option key while opening Entourage. It’s recommended that you choose the “Verify” option to check the health of your Entourage database.

Be aware that if you use Entourage 2004 the “rebuild database” option in the Database Utility removes all category information that you’ve assigned to contacts and email messages. I believe it also deletes all of your Notes. These problems were apparently fixed in Entourage 2008, though I haven’t verified that personally.

Entourage stores its database in this location:

/Users/<your username>/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Office Identities 2004/Main Identity

Note: If you’re using Entourage 2008 then the folder name changes to Office Identities 2008.

To backup the database I recommend copying the entire Main Identity folder. Look inside this folder to make sure that the database file inside was modified today. This way you can be more certain that this is your current database. Entourage lets users create multiple Identities so you could have more then one identity folder. If you’ve used the Database Utility to repair your database then you may find more then one database inside the identity folder.

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Last week Apple released an update to their Backup application which is available to all MobileMe subscribers. This new version, Backup version 3.2, is recommended for everybody but adds some new features. Apple describes the new features in this technical article.

The most important, and in my opinion, useful enhancement is that backup data stored on one’s iDisk gets recycled automatically. There are, however, some important details that one needs to understand. Recycling means that old copies of backup data will be removed automatically from one’s iDisk. I think this is a positive development since in the past Backup would simply fill up one’s iDisk storage space and then fail to complete successive backups. Worse yet, it would hardly notify you. This was a big problem in my book. Therefore, I’m pleased that data recycling will occur. However, it’s important to know the following details.

Data recycling can not be turned off. Data recycling occurs only for backup data stored on an iDisk, not for data stored on a local hard drive or CD/DVD. Data recycling apparently does NOT occur if one’s backup schedule is for monthly or quarterly backups to iDisk. Data recycling occurs after 30 days for daily iDisk backups and after 12 weeks for weekly iDisk backups. It’s unknown if Backup notifies you when data recycling occurs. If you store your backup data on your own external hard drive then you can choose from the following recycle schedules: every 4 weeks, 12 weeks, 6 months, 12 months, 2 years or only when the drive is full.

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