World Backup Day

It’s that time of year again—it’s World Backup Day. Have you backed up your important files? I use 2 external storage devices to backup my files, although they are both at home so are vulnerable to theft and disasters. What method(s) are you using, if any at all?

View some of my other posts related to backups to understand why it’s a good idea to back up your files.

Backing Up Your Data

Today, March 31, is World Backup Day. It’s a reminder for all of us to back up our important files. I am backing up my photos, videos, and personal documents as I write this blog, and I try to back up my files on a monthly basis.

My current process is to back up my files onto 2 external hard drives, each of which has 8 TB of storage capacity, which is currently sufficient to store all of my files. However, I recently learned about the “3-2-1 Plan” which is described at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce website and in many other online sources. In summary, you should have:

• 3 copies of your data
• 2 different kinds of media for your backups
• 1 backup copy that is offsite

The idea behind the 3-2-1 Plan is to diversify your backups to avoid having a single point of failure. For example, you could have 3 copies of your data, but if they are all in 1 place and there is a fire, flood, or theft, then that single event could potentially destroy all of your data despite you having backups.

Admittedly my backup approach does involve 3 copies of data (internal SSD and 2 external hard drives) and 2 kinds of media (if you count SSD and hard drives as being “different” kinds of media), but I do to have 1 backup copy that is offsite. For many years I have contemplated bringing 1 of my 2 external hard drives to my parents’ house each time I visit them, but I have never executed on that plan. Maybe it’s time for the to re-think my approach.

How well does your backup plan stack up against the 3-2-1 plan?

I Resolve to Back Up My Files (BONUS: How to Start Up in Recovery Mode)

I recently wrote about how I nearly bricked an iMac while upgrading the operating system, but I was able to save the day by starting up in Safe Mode in macOS and fixing the problem. Well, it's been an adventurous year for me since I had another close call.

Normally I am careful to periodically back up my files, especially my photos and videos. While I often sync my "favorite" photos and videos to Google Photos where I have unlimited storage, I also prefer to back up my original RAW photos (in Canon CR2 file format) and AVCHD videos (in MTS file format) to external hard drives. Since February 2018, my 3TB external hard drives reached capacity, and I had a variety of excuses to delay the purchase of additional external hard drives: busy at work, looking for a good deal on higher capacity drives, etc. So I have copies of all of my photos and videos leading up to February 2018 on 2 external hard drives. From February 2018 to today, I have had only 1 copy of my iMac hard drive, and they could potentially vanish in the event of a hard drive crash.

Sometime in mid- to late-2018, I started getting SMART notifications that my iMac internal hard drive was showing signs of wear and tear. I also noticed that on startup, the progress bar would sometimes pause at about three fourths of the way to completion. Sometimes it would eventually finish the boot process, and at other times it would simply hang, and I would be forced to power off the iMac and reboot. All signs of impending disaster.

Black Friday rolled around, and I decided to finally purchase a pair of shiny new 8 TB external hard drives. They were back ordered but finally arrived the second week of December (i.e., a couple weeks ago). However, the 8 TB drives have been sitting in my office unopened ever since. Enter more excuses for not backing up my files: holiday shopping, family gatherings, catching up on paying bills, etc.

Today I wondered if resetting the PRAM would help fix some of those startup issues that I described above. So I went ahead and restarted my iMac while holding down the command, option, P, and R keys (warning: don't try this unless you know what you are doing). As expected, the iMac restarted once, detected the PRAM reset request, and restarted again. All expected behavior so far. But when it restarted the 2nd time, it booted into my TechTool Pro rescue partition. Hmmm, that was strange. But since I was there, I ran some diagnostics and with the exception of the SMART warnings that I already knew about, everything checked out OK. So I decided to restart my computer normally. However, in the startup volume selection dialog box, my Macintosh HD volume was nowhere to be found. That explains why the machine rebooted into the TechTool Pro rescue partition. I tried warm and cold reboots, but now each restart would arrive at the screen with the Apple logo, stop loading, and simply hang.

I spent the next several minutes in disbelief that I have preached to all my friends and family that they should back up their files and that every hard drive is essentially a ticking time bomb. Well, it looks like my hard drive's time bomb exploded today, with nearly a year's worth of photos and videos (304.28 GB to be exact) not backed up.

After 3 or 4 failed attempts to start my iMac, I tried restarting in Safe Mode (again, described here). No luck. However, restarting in Recovery Mode (restarting while holding the Command and R keys) did give me access to macOS Utilities:



From there I was able to run Disk Utility and run First Aid on my Macintosh HD volume. Among a variety of other usual tasks, I noticed that Disk Utility performed some "deferred repairs" on the volume. I think that did the trick, as I was then able to restart the iMac and get access to the Finder.

WHEW! I am backing up files as I write this post. Fingers crossed that I have not lost any precious moments. Normally I don't make any new year's resolutions, but in 2019 I resolve to regularly back up my files.

Corrupt or Incompatible iPod Backups

I am the proud owner of a 1st generation 8GB iPod Touch, Model MA623LL, iOS 3.1.3 (7E18). For the past couple years, I have been receiving the following error message when trying to back up its contents through iTunes:

The Apple Support web site for this particular issue simply says to Contact Apple Support. Upon searching help forums, most experts recommend deleting the existing backups (either through iTunes or directly via the operating system's directories) and then doing a clean backup which is exactly the same recommendation as stated in the error message. I have done that, but I still get the error message.

I don't have anything important on this old iPod. Few modern apps work on it anymore, so I use it only to play music, and I have backup copies of my music elsewhere. Therefore, it is not worth it for me to pursue assistance from Apple Support. That being said, I wonder if I am getting the error message because the iPod is so old that it is no longer supported by the backup methods in more recent versions of iTunes.

Just curious...

PSA: An Ounce of Prevention

Recently I ran some diagnostics on my external backup hard drives, and there are signs that they are starting to fail in their old age (they are about a decade old). You know what they say about an ounce of prevention, so before they crash, I decided to move my backup files onto some newer external hard drives with more storage capacity.

One of my new drives is a WD My Cloud drive. Its setup included plugging in a power source and connecting an ethernet cable between the drive and my router. There is no physical connection between my computer and the backup drive, so the data are streamed over my network connection. I am backing up 2.99 TB of data, and the estimated time to complete this task is currently "About a day":

I don't know how that compares to the data transfer rate of physical USB or FireWire connections, but the setup was pretty straightforward, I don't have to babysit the process, and incremental backups will take merely a fraction of the time.

In any case, I hope you are not only periodically backing up your data but also (1) using multiple backup devices, (2) storing them in multiple locations, and (3) periodically checking the integrity of your backup devices.

Bizarre Love Triangle - Photos for iOS, Google Photos, and Photos for macOS

Has this ever happened to you?

In the last 2 years since we both bought a 64 GB iPhone 6 Plus, my wife has rarely deleted photos and videos from her phone. Today she received the above error message. Given that everyone has a finite amount of space on their phones, I thought I'd share my "phonetography" workflow on iOS and macOS. This of course applies to both iPhones and iPads.

1) Take pictures, lots of them. Why not? Storage space is cheap, and memories are precious. Fire away. Turn on HDR and save both the regular and HDR versions. Record video in the maximum resolution and maximum frame rate. View them in Photos for iOS.

2) Periodically sync to Google Photos. As long as you have a Google account, you can upload an unlimited number of photos to your account, provided that you allow Google to apply some compression to your photos. While you currently get 15 GB if you save the original full resolution images from your phones, I think a small amount of compression (no noticeable difference in image quality in my opinion) is worth having unlimited storage. Two reasons for this: most people take rather mediocre smartphone photos and this option is just a backup for hard drive disasters.

3) After syncing to Google Photos, sync photos to Photos for macOS (formerly iPhoto). This will include your original unaltered photos, plus any in-phone edits you might have applied. Also backup these photos to at least 1 (preferably more) external hard drives to insulate against hard drive failure on your main Mac.

4) Only after completing steps 2 and 3, go back and delete photos that you do not need immediately accessible on your phone. Keep the ones you absolutely want to have on your phone, knowing that you have full-resolution backups on Photos for macOS (and external hard drives) as well as your entire library available in the cloud on Google Photos which can be accessed anywhere that you have an internet connection. If you are judicious about preserving a selected number of "keepers" on your phone, you should rarely run into trouble with running out of space on your phone--at least not due to photos.

If you have a workflow and archival programs you'd like to share, leave a comment!