For those that have been following me on Twitter the last few days would have noticed some more than usual tech talk from me. There was a reason for that, the hard drive of my trusty Apple MacBook Pro had been giving me some headaches the last few months, reaching a climax this Thursday: an actually failing hard drive!
Thankfully I have been quite consciously backing up all my data, and have been doing so since I started using a laptop as my main workstation. So it was practically replacing the dead hard drive with a new Intel 320 120GB solid state drive, after having opened up the MBP. In the last years I have tinkered quite a bit with computers, however I was a bit reluctant to tinker with the MBP as it is my production machine. After reading up on the task at hand earlier on, using an iFixit guide, it turned out that it was quite a simple task. Pfew!
OK .. so a few words on my whole backup workflow that I have now improved bit more when I noticed my hard drive failing.
My whole backup workflow contains several pieces that all connect to each other, my main storage is the MBP and an external 1TB G-Tech G-Drive that contains my RAW photo archive and Aperture libraries. My MBP is weekly cloned to another external drive via SuperDuper!, and as of this week I make an additional nightly clone to an on-site external drive.
It is practically the same idea with my photo archive and the referenced Aperture libraries, stored on an external G-Tech drive that I manually rsync to another G-Tech G-Drive after a batch import of images from a shoot. To update my off-site photo backup I do bring the drive back home and do another rsync.
Another piece in this workflow has just been introduced when I started noticing that the MBP drive was failing, an online cloud backup. I have been using Dropbox for quite a while now to just keep data handy, however after researching good cloud backup workflows a bit better, I started using it more. I now do keep my current projects, both my programming projects and personal projects, in my Dropbox folder. This allows me to keep my projects always backed up online and up to date, as changes are automatically uploaded.
Based on a post that I read on another blog I am now looking further into further use of backups in the cloud. Because an online backup means that I always have an up to date backup as long as I have an Internet connection, as in my current workflow off-site backups are only weekly updated at best.
For now my backup workflow has turned out to be a good solution for me, as after I had installed my new SSD I was up and running again within two hours with a fresh install of Mac OS and a restore from a clone. However, improvements can always be made, and a backup is nothing without a scenario to restore the data within a reasonable amount of time.
Oh yeah, my MBP has an amazing performance now with an SSD and 8GB of memory 🙂
Disclaimer: No, I’m not sponsored by any of the organizations or persons that I have linked to in this article.
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