One step closer to sleeping well at night

My second pocket hard drive finally arrived from Amazon, and I have reached a milestone in my digital life: I now have two complete backups on portable media that will never be in the same place at the same time.

Are those little drives different?

I’m fairly certain that those pocket drives are all the same inside, with minimal cosmetic differences between Western Digital, Seagate, iOmega, et al.

I liked the appearance of the WD My Passport line, so I bought a matching pair of them in 320MB.

Of course, they come in bright colors, so I bought a black one and an orange one.

Setup

After formatting them with NTFS , I named the volumes WD_BLACK and WD_ORANGE. This way, when I plug one in, I am extremely clear on which volume is being manipulated. Nobody wants to accidentally wipe out the wrong portable hard drive, or worse, overwrite the source drive.

I then set up rsync on my Mac to mirror all of the changes on my network drives onto whichever of the two WD units I have plugged in.

Note that rsync is an extremely geeky way to go about this; there are good tools that allow you to point and click your way to a trouble-free backup.

Macintosh users note: Macs normally can’t write to NTFS volumes. I wanted NTFS for flexibility, so I use NTFS for Mac OS X from Paragon. There’s also a freeware driver out there called NTFS-3G that many swear by.

The initial backup took almost an entire day. Synchronizing takes only a few minutes.

Day to day

I bought two Case-Logic cases for the drives, so they can travel safely. I now keep one of the drives in a desk drawer in my office at work, and once per week I do the following:

• Perform a sync of the drive I have at home
• Take that drive to work with me
• Bring home its brother

I am now fairly confident that even in the worst possible scenario (e.g. house sucked up by a tornado) I would lose one week of data at most.

We keep all of our important stuff at home on a mirrored NAS device, so I probably will not lose anything at all in the event of a single hard drive failure.

Online storage?

I’m still on the fence about Mozy and Carbonite and their bretheren—I want to keep a full backup of all of my files, MP3s, Photos, and PDFs. These services seem to get pricy once the data goes beyond a few gigs. I’m watching them, however, and I might just be convinced one day.

Until then, there’s something quite satisfying about hand-carrying a backup drive to a safe offsite location. Now I just need the briefcase with the attached handcuff!