Saturday, January 3, 2009
Slept in. Patrick baked a coconut-blueberry pound cake. Breakfast: fruit smoothie, coconut-blueberry pound cake. Worked on Danny's website: uploaded custom gift certificate design to SpaBoom. Patrick took a nap. Journal updates: added 2009 files, updated summaries, made small edits. Dinner at home with Patrick: bbq pork and vegetables stir-fry, leftover steamed rice. Watched Heroes season 3 episode 9 (It's Coming) on Netflix instant watch with Patrick. After much detailed research I have decided that CrashPlan+ will be the offsite backup solution I will use in addition to using Time Machine locally. A 5-year-warranty 1 TB hard drive will cost $100, an enclosure or dock will cost about $40, CrashPlan+ will cost $60. So $200 will theoretically give me at least 5 years of offsite backup not counting backup-buddy-side power and bandwidth and possible offsite backup downtime due to a hard drive crash. The hard drive I selected is the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 (ST31000333AS), which is particularly energy-efficient and also very quiet, so power and noise shouldn't be too much of a concern for my backup buddy. Another good choice is the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.B, but the consumer-grade version has only a 3-year warranty and the higher-priced server-grade version has a 5-year warranty. (I think consumers buying hard drives should avoid anything with less than a 5-year warranty. This means avoid some Hitachi and probably all Samsung drives for now.) CrashPlan+, like macminicolo's Transport, will let me do the initial backup locally and then physically send the drive offsite for incremental backups, which means that the impact on bandwidth will be minimal. However, there's a big difference when you look at the price. A new Time Capsule for Transport takes on the warranty of your Mac, so for me with 3 years of AppleCare with a 1-year-old computer, that means my Time Capsule would have less than 2 years of warranty. And a 1-TB Time Capsule is $500, and Transport is a minimum of $29 per month (or $348 per year). So I could spend a minimum of $1,200 and get a minimum of 2 years of backup with Transport, or I could spend $600 and theoretically use CrashPlan+ for 6 to 8 years, buying CrashPlan+ upgrades every 2 or 3 years and buying newer and larger hard drives as my offsite backup drive dies beyond warranty. Transport = $1.64 per day (over 2 years) or $1.41 per day (over 3 years). CrashPlan+ = $0.11 per day (over 5 years), and CrashPlan+ gets even cheaper the longer that hard drive lasts. Now I just need to find the right backup buddy. Must be outside of the California Bay Area, preferably outside of California, must have a stable internet connection with decent bandwidth, and preferably with an always-on computer (but this isn't a requirement for me—yet). By the way, my first-generation Mac Mini has a power load of 85 watts, for what it's worth. I bet if needed I could retrofit that with a 2.5-inch solid-state hard drive (SSD), attach an external energy-efficient terabyte hard drive, ship it all to my backup buddy, and come out with a very-low-power offsite backup solution that doesn't require my backup buddy to have an always-on computer. At minimum the drive can sleep when not needed—not sure about the computer. I've been researching offsite backup solutions for months now, and so it feels good to have come to a conclusion on it. There are so many choices available that it's definitely not easy picking the right one. I still feel everyone who cares about their data needs at least 1 onsite and 1 offsite backup solution. In general offsite backup solutions are more robust for Windows users than for Mac users, but this has more to do with the large number of Windows users determining the market potential than it does with what is technically possible. With OS X based on UNIX you might think that there would be many good solutions available for Mac, but there really aren't (I've investigated them all), and that kind of makes CrashPlan+ particularly appealing because it removes the platform barriers—you can own a Mac but back up to a friend with Mac or Windows or Linux (or Solaris).
Below are examples of Console errors that I have recently received from Time Machine. It's not clear to me if these errors are things on which I need to act, but I think I can ignore the -43 errors. (Occurrences of my computer's name have been replaced by "computername" and occurrences of my OS X account username have been replaced by "username".)
Jan 2 09:04:38 computername /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[45132]: Error: (-43) SrcErr:NO Copying /Library/Application Support/IDriveforMac/username/backupReferenceFile.plist to /Volumes/Time Machine/Backups.backupdb/computername/2009-01-02-090437.inProgress/ECE6F133-B42E-4C5E-98BE-72FBBB281D4E/Macintosh HD/Library/Application Support/IDriveforMac/username
Dec 30 08:04:37 computername /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[19341]: Error: (-43) SrcErr:NO Copying /Library/Application Support/IDriveforMac/username/backupReferenceFile.plist to /Volumes/Time Machine/Backups.backupdb/computername/2008-12-30-080436.inProgress/578DA9BC-E5A3-4EF7-9DCD-5093096CF7FF/Macintosh HD/Library/Application Support/IDriveforMac/username
Dec 29 17:04:46 computername /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[14490]: Error: (-43) SrcErr:NO Copying /Users/username/Music/$RECYCLE.BIN to /Volumes/Time Machine/Backups.backupdb/computername/2008-12-29-170436.inProgress/81059C26-EFD9-4A64-B6C1-D24C31328222/Macintosh HD/Users/username/Music
Dec 27 18:32:03 computername /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[9197]: Error: (-39) SrcErr:YES Copying (null) to (null)
Dec 27 19:32:05 computername /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[9389]: Error: (-43) SrcErr:NO Copying /Users/username/Library/Preferences/ByHost/.GlobalPreferences.0014510b0a6a.plist to /Volumes/Time Machine/Backups.backupdb/computername/2008-12-27-193145.inProgress/24DE2617-8FFE-4BFD-B536-F37EB08483DC/Macintosh HD/Users/username/Library/Preferences/ByHost
Dec 26 01:17:57 computername /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[57361]: Error: (-43) SrcErr:NO Copying /Applications/.DS_Store to /Volumes/backup/Backups.backupdb/computername/2008-12-26-011744.inProgress/C764CF15-B3A1-4418-988E-E7EA2DF448FF/Macintosh HD/Applications
Dec 25 08:17:48 computername /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[51171]: Error: (-43) SrcErr:NO Copying /Applications/.DS_Store to /Volumes/backup/Backups.backupdb/computername/2008-12-25-081743.inProgress/6CA64E19-7FA5-4754-8B9D-6797F241AB11/Macintosh HD/Applications