What is your backup strategy?

Wikis, Polls & Dev Envs Dev Env / Tools / AI
,
1

I’ve been reinstalling macOS after trying out Tahoe, and when I went to migrate from a Time Machine backup I got an error I’ve not see before:

IMG_8327
IMG_83271200×949 131 KB

Which reminded me of the importance of contingency, so thought it might be an idea to post this thread (that’s my tip, use Time Machine and with more than one drive!)

Curious what everyone else’s backup strategy is?

2

Btw if anyone’s curious I’m not sure why it was saying my Mac was formatted as case-sensitive as I’m pretty sure I had formatted the drive as APFS, I had another TM backup so just reformatted and started again with the other backup and that worked fine. It’s possible I had formatted it incorrectly the first time but it just reminded me of the importance of contingency, hence this thread.

My macOS backup tips are:

  • Use Time Machine.
  • Contingency - have multiple copies (I usually have two on the go concurrently as well as older drives with older backups (I keep a look out for SSDs in the sales)).
  • Use iCloud for things like contacts and calendars.

My preferred way of transferring to a new machine (or just periodically after every second update of a major macOS version) is to do a clean install (manually copying of your files). Eg: Clean macOS install – the easy way – (via @AstonJ)

3

All my code and configurations are managed by git and pushed to multiple remote servers. And I have nothing else that is important on my laptop. :sweat_smile:

2 Likes
4

Really? No photos, personal documents, letters or files etc? :icon_biggrin:

5

Yes, no photos, no local letters on my laptop. I have an external disk, who has slept in my drawer for years, for old photos and personal documents. New photos about my life is in my cellphone, with no copies or backups. :thinking:

Actually I am not worried about losing those photos since my family have copies of those good ones. I guess that’s also some kind of distributed backups. :smiley:

1 Like