Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Why Use Multiple Partitions?
You can, if you want, use one external drive for versioned backups and
another for duplicates. But I suggest getting a single, higher-capacity
drive and dividing it into two or more partitions (as I describe ahead,
in
Prepare Your Hard Drive
) to reduce cost and clutter. (If you have
more than one such drive, and rotate between them, that's another
matter—but even then, you'll be glad to have fewer devices to juggle.)
Why Automate Backups?
I can say from personal experience that backups are far more likely
to happen regularly if your backup software runs without any manual
intervention. And I want to assure you that
regular
backups are the
only kind that matter. I think it's fair to state this as a corollary to
Murphy's Law: “The likelihood of suffering data loss increases in direct
proportion to the elapsed time since your last backup.” In other words,
if you're performing all your backups manually, the one day you forget
(or run out of time) will be the day something goes wrong.
In some situations, you don't have to do anything special to make
backups run automatically; in others, you have to be careful to set up
your backup software to run at a set time.
Schedule-Free Backups
Not so long ago, most backup software required you to set a specific
time for it to run—say, every day at 3:00 in the morning, or once
a week on Sunday afternoon. An underlying assumption of this sort
of scheduling was that the backup would probably take a long time
(possibly slowing down your computer and maybe your network while
it ran, too), meaning you may not want backups happening while
you're trying to get something done with your Mac.
Increasingly, though, backup programs have become more
sophisticated, such that they don't necessarily require an explicit
schedule. Time Machine, for example, runs incremental backups every
