This is a tutorial for backing up your mission critical data. That novel that you only have one copy of, your thesis, your tax returns, your family’s vacation photos. Whatever is really important that you can’t lose. If you just have this stuff on your hard drive and don’t have a backup system in place: get one! Hard drives break.

Please note this is for mac users, but cloud storage programs like Dropbox work for PCs too.

BACKUP PHILOSOPHY
The keywords about backup are: redundancy and automation. You want your backups to be redundant so that if something fails your files are always somewhere else. You want it automatic so that everything stays current and because if it’s left up to me I’ll screw it up.

I aim for 2 backups of all my critical files. One that’s outside of the house (online) and one that’s on another hard drive.

This is what I do it.

AUTOMATION
I use an app called Hazel which is a great program that does automatic functions. It’s easy enough to use so you don’t need to be a programmer, but powerful enough that you feel like one.

The most important file that I’m currently working on is the Scrivener file I’m using to write my book. Because I’m PARANOID of losing it, I back that file up all over the place, often. Years ago I used to work in Word and, this has probably happened to everyone, I remember saving over a Brontosaurus-sized essay with a blank document and had to rewrite the whole thing from memory. That sucks. I don’t want to experience that kind of pain again. So I make numerous timed backups as I’m working on the project.

In Hazel I have a rule that makes an archived copy of my novel every 15 minutes while I’m working on it. Here’s what that looks like:

How it works is it looks for my scrivener file, and (if it hasn’t backed it up yet) it copies that file to an archives folder, where it’s renamed with the date and time, then archived into a zip file. That way if I delete everything or a catastrophe happens while I’m writing, at worst I’ve lost about 15 minutes of work. Plus I can always revert back to a previous version if I made a mistake—like accidentally deleting a chapter without realizing it.

The biggest plus about using Hazel is I don’t have to do anything. Everything happens in the background and I’m taken out of the equation.

CLOUD STORAGE
There are a lot of cloud storage services out there. I use Dropbox which syncs a folder on your computer to a server online making an exact backup of the folder’s contents. I basically live out of this folder. My writing and design files are all in here so they automatically get uploaded on the web.

Dropbox gives you 2GB of free space when you sign up which is more than enough for my mission critical files.

A word of warning though, because Dropbox is a syncing program it will sync whatever is in the folder. So if you accidentally delete everything in the folder, Dropbox will think that’s what you wanted to do, and it’ll sync an empty folder, and you’re screwed.

If you’re concerned about your data being on some server somewhere, where it’s only protected by a password, you can go a step further and encrypt your data. Any sensitive information like my tax return are encrypted in a sparse image before they go online. Dropbox has a wiki with some good solutions, but if you’re super paranoid about security I would suggest getting PGP which will encrypt your entire hard drive, making it impossible for someone to see your data. OSX has FileVault that does that, but don’t use it. It slows down your hard drive and there’s plenty of horror stories out there of data corruption.

HARD DRIVE BACKUP
My final line of defence is a weekly backup of my Dropbox folder to an external hard drive. Again, I use Hazel to do that automatically. I only connect my hard drive once and while so when I do, Hazel will check to see if the last backup is older than a week and, if so, it’ll copy that folder and archive it in dated zip file.

That’s it.

For photos I have Hazel make backups to that external hard drive but I think I’m going to eventually get a Flickr or Picasa account so that my photos will also be stored online.

Just in case.