I found this article very interesting following your previous backup strategy article nearly five years ago. That article made me seriously think about backup and realize that my strategy then was lacking. I changed and to this day, I still engage the strategy used by you at that time (alas, no Drobo for me), but use Dropbox and Backblaze as well.

I would be most interested to know your current view on Synchronize! Pro from Qdea, having regard to today’s backup solutions. This is relevant to me as that software was central to your backup strategy nearly five years ago (and is still used by me), but did not get a mention in your recent article.

Thanks.

I was curious how you set up SuperDuper to fire off a Growl alert. I assume you changed the settings for SuperDuper in the Growl Prefs Pane? Or did you use a shell script from within SuperDuper?

I’ve recently started to move my offline backup from BackBlaze to CrashPlan. It offers a cloud backup like BackBlaze, but provides two additional benefits.

First, you can backup between any two computers, not just to their service, and it costs nothing. I have both my parents’ computer and my wife’s iMac backing up to backup folders on my Drobo. Then, I back up my system to an external 2Tb drive I sent to my parents (what’s cool is I did a backup to the drive myself first, then FedExed it to them, and CrashPlan picked up where it left off…slick). I’m also backing up to CrashPlan’s cloud-based servers, but I’m not sure I need the redundancy. For $5/mo, though, I might just keep it.

Second, CrashPlan is much better behaved in terms of CPU load. You can throttle the % of the CPU used when at and away from your computer, and I find CrashPlan to obey these settings faithfully.

Only downside is that the client is a Java app with a very un-Mac-like UI. It’s decent enough (though not as simple as BackBlaze) and given that it’s used only rarely, I can live with that.

Great post. Thanks for sharing.