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A personal message about the importance of backing up your data

Woo hoo! Time Machine to the rescue.

My personal laptop, work laptop, and Dreamhost shell account all auto-sync a few personal data files of very useful data between them… This morning I corrupted one instance and that corruption was synchronized, wiping out all the work in all three locations…

Thankfully I have two redundant backup plans for my personal laptop:

  • I regularly (about every 2 weeks) do a Carbon Copy Cloner full drive clone to a bootable external USB3 drive… (that gives me a drive I can plug into an emergency rental laptop)
  • I have Time Machine backup my laptop every 2 hours to a Time Capsule (though any Network Storage or external drive should work) – but only copy the changes….

I was able to use Time Machine to delve back to 5am this morning (before I was up) grab a clean copy of the file from then and restore it, and then I had to manually re-apply the few changes I made around 7:40am from human memory; but that was much better than having to recreate all the data.

Remember to back your data up often and in a couple of different ways.

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