« FileMaker Meeting in … | Home | MBS Filemaker Plugin,… »

You make backups?

On monday I wondered why my Time Machines stopped doing backups. Preparing took forever. Later that day I got messages from my scripts for building plugins about NilObjectExceptions. Turned out that operations like creating folders or creating binarystreams failed for virtual volumes. Later in evening the Finder started complaining that disk is full when copying files. VMWare stopped to launch as it could not write file for virtual memory. SMART analysis of my disk gave no errors, so I presumed a failure in the internal data structures for managing blocks.

Well, a SSD is a dream in speed, but when management fails on various levels, there is not much to repair like a good old hard disk with real disks.

I do have backups: Online backup (so I can backup at client office, in hotel, etc.), Time Machine (Apple's backup software) with several Time Capsules in various places and an external bootable USB disk for cloning. So I updated my clone with last changes, formatted my internal SSD and cloned things back. Now everything is right and not a single file is lost.

If the clone is not an option, e.g. outdated, I would have used time capsule to restore last backup and use my online backup to get the changed files from the last 2 days.

What do you do for backup?

If you are interested in online backups and you want to use your own webspace or your own S3 account (Without an intermediate company between), you can use Arq from Haystack Software. It's a nice app to run in background and upload changed files. I'm using it now for over 2 years. Any I often see myself restoring files using Arq instead of Time Machine due the easier to use browsing.

If you like to order a copy, you can use this coupon code for 10% off: U17ITZRZL4UPIVBK (expires September 30, 2014).

I'm not affiliated with Haystack Software and just an user enjoying this software. Claris FileMaker Plugin
05 09 14 - 14:17