At my company, I am the IT department in addition to my primary role as a UX designer and web PM. You guessed it, we’re small. This means I have years of experience keeping a small shop up and running, in addition to the four years I spent at Apple before this, much of that as a Mac Genius helping hundreds or thousands of people with their own personal tech disasters.
When it came time for one of our employees to spin-off into her own consulting gig, she asked for advice on getting an external drive for backups. My response unintentionally became a short course on Backup Strategy for Apple-powered Small Businesses. I realized I knew many small shops that might benefit from this, so I’m posting it to the Internet for any and all takers. (Nota bene: there are a few Amazon Affiliate links below, most aren’t. Consider that the tip jar if you benefit from something in this essay.)
Mandatory: 1. Subscribe to an always-on cloud-based backup service for your files. 2. Maintain two external hard drives with fully-bootable images of your Mac using the application “Super Duper”. Keep one with you, and one at home, when you travel. If you never travel for business, keep the second one off-site to hedge against theft or building disaster (fire, etc.).
Suggested: Discover your favorite workflow with a cloud storage system, for on-the-fly disaster continuity. There will be situations where you can’t immediately put hands on a backup system, like if you’re on-site for a client. Each cloud-storage provider has certain advantages.
Your Primary Mac: Before disaster strikes, decide where you’ll get service or buy a replacement Mac. You’ll want to act fast and not panic. A day or two without a system will feel like an eternity, even if you’re not near a deadline or travel.
If there is an Apple Store near your home base, sign up for their Joint Venture service so you are bumped to the front of the line for priority repairs, and can use a loaner during the duration of your repair. Learn about Apple’s retail services for businesses. This service is the same regardless if your systems are under AppleCare warranty. The only difference is your outlay of cash. I heartily recommend AppleCare for all your business-critical devices. Any Mac AppleCare agreement also covers any Apple-branded peripherals you use with your Mac, including the display.
If you’re fortunate enough to live somewhere with a third-party Apple-authorized dealer, many have programs to keep Macs up and running, as well. Be suspicious of 3rd-parties who are don’t carry the Apple-authorization, they cannot perform repairs under warranty. As an alternative to relying upon Apple, or an 3rd-party Apple-authorized provider, consider upgrading your Mac sooner than usual. Keep the most elder Mac well maintained as your backup system.
Your first line of defense is an always-on cloud-based backup system. A piece of software on your Mac will monitor your files for changes and upload just those changes to storage at a service provider. My choice is CrashPlan, which I have extensive experience with at work, and like enough to pay for their consumer product to backup my personal devices at home. A consumer plan is likely fine for a solo or tiny business.
The point of always-on backup is to backup your individual files in between full system backups. If you backup on Fridays, and have a major system failure on Tuesday, and something amazing happened on Monday, you’re going to be sad. Don’t be sad. More importantly, don’t waste time recreating work. Your time will cost more than this small investment in your disaster planning.
You don’t want to attempt a major, many-gigabyte recovery from a cloud-based service… they’re very slow to download from. This is what your on-site backups are for. And, they are your final, worst-case scenario safety net. Be aware that your first upload to a cloud system will take a very long time.
A second-choice is Backblaze. I have no experience with them, but they have a good rep, and legend has it they were founded by former-Apple engineers.
If you are broadband-challenged, or use metered cellular data, fall back to an always-on backup system like Apple’s Time Machine, possibly powered by their Time Capsule product. Some Apple Consultants would warn you strongly against the Time Capsule due to reports of many failures. I’ve not personally seen that problem. Plus if you follow my mandatory strategies here, a Time Capsule failure will not leave you stranded; merely inconvenienced. Time Capsules are covered under your Mac’s AppleCare warranty, by the way. Otherwise, there are Network Attached Storage devices which are Time Machine compatible.
Here are three drives that I have on my desk that I’d recommend. In order of least expensive to most:
If you want to pay a few more dollars for something that has…
shock resistance, drop resistance (4ft), rain-resistant, and pressure-resistant—you can drive over it with a 1-ton car
…then you can pay a few dollars more for this.
These are 1TB drives as an example. You should have a backup disk whose capacity exceeds that of your internal drive for safety’s sake. If you have a 512GB internal drive, get a 1TB backup. If you have a 1TB internal drive, get a 1.5 or 2TB backup.
They are portable models so they can travel with you. They are powered by the same cable they use for data, no external power bricks necessary. Apple-focused vendor Other World Computing’s house brand are well-built, and you’re not paying for a fancy name on the box. These have a USB3 connection, as do most Macs made in the last couple years. USB 3.0 supports reasonable read/write speeds. If you need a faster connection via Thunderbolt, you already know. If you need an SSD for extra speed in your backup disks, you already know. Most people can get away without paying extra for SSDs to keep costs down. All of the below links lead to non-SSD versions of these products.
As a 1-person shop, a 2-disk strategy is the prudent choice. Backup to your drive as often as you reasonably can. I’d go no longer than one week between backups. Set a repeating alarm in your calendar, and don’t ignore it.
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Use SuperDuper to make fully bootable backup (cloning), and when you make your subsequent backups, it’ll be “Smart Updated”. That’s a “delta update” which means “only erases and re-writes changed files”. This goes significantly faster than other backups. Even though the site looks old, the app is actively maintained by its developer, who happens to be local to Boston. Worth every penny. I’ve used it for years.
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At the same time, use the same process to redundantly backup weekly to a second drive. When you travel, leave one drive home in the event that during your travels, your Mac and your backup drive suffer failure or loss (not implausible since they’d probably be in the same bag). If you use a second portable drive for this role, you can rotate which drive travels with you, and spread the wear of travel across both drives evenly, prolonging their effective lives.
If you don’t travel regularly, keep the second drive one off-site to hedge against theft or a structural emergency, like a fire or natural disaster. The most cautious will combine these two and have a three disk solution, in which one disk rotates out off-site periodically.
You could use CrashPlan to recover from this case, or consider it your “third disk”. But cloud backups do not clone your Mac, and it takes a good deal of work and time to rebuild a system from a cloud backup, due to network transfer speeds. Additionally, you can’t reinstall applications from CrashPlan. Cloud backup’s role is recovering a “less than everything” number of files and as a last resort in the absolute worst-case scenario. Recovering from a cloned disk is far faster and complete. But CrashPlan is always running and that’s why its important to have—to get back critical files that came into existence between full system backups. Downloading all your data from the cloud can take days and days on a fast connection. You can boot and run from an external drive in minutes, and setup a new system from an external drive completely in an hour or two. Which would you rather do the day before a business engagement?
Keep truly critical files in a cloud storage service as well. You may well already use Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Box, or something similar. This can mean simply having a folder in your Dropbox directory that is “current” so that if you have a failure on the road and cannot immediately access another Mac to plug into, you can use any Internet-connected system to reach files on Dropbox via Dropbox.com’s web interface—assuming the files themselves are readable on the machine you’re using (Apple Pages on Windows isn’t going to work, for example). Don’t forget that all these systems offer tablet and phone apps. That can be a viable emergency plan for many documents.
For your traditional “office” documents and non-proprietary images like PDFs, an extra hedge on the readability of documents is the use of Google Docs, as their web-based editor will work in any reasonably new web browser on any platform. If you fear a lack of Internet on your Mac preventing you from accessing your Google Docs files, you can use the Google Drive app on your Mac to keep local copies that will open in your web browser even if you have no Internet connection. Just as Dropbox does, this will take space on your Mac’s internal hard drive. Some people don’t realize Google Drive stores any file, space permitting, whether Google Apps can read them or not. It can do most of the same things as Dropbox, though many aren’t as well polished. It’s worth noting that while a Google Apps account for $5/mo/user gives 30GB of storage (and storage of anything Google-based [email, docs, etc] doesn’t count against that) that for $10/mo/user, your Drive storage is unlimited.
My recommendation with cloud storage systems (locally sync’d) is to experiment to see which workflow you can best live with. If already you’re paying for Google Apps, then Google Drive allows you to use the space you pay for already, versus paying an additional vendor (unless you’re relying upon the free Dropbox tier). I should note that if you live in a world still dominated by Microsoft Office, beyond sending my sympathies, I suggest you explore Microsoft Office 365. In addition to being a subscription service to Microsoft Office apps, it comes with storage in their cloud product called “OneDrive” which shares similarities with Dropbox and Google Drive. They offer web-based versions of Office which can edit files from your OneDrive as well as offering iOS apps, which share some of the advantages of Google Drive addressed above.
I will leave you with a plea to consider data security as an issue of equal importance. It’s one problem if your hardware breaks on its own. It’s another if someone breaks in and steals or destroys data. Remember, you’re not just protecting your data, but your clients’ data, as well.
Use a password manager to store your really secure passwords that are unique to every service, and use Two-factor Authentication everywhere it is offered (but especially your Apple ID, email, and cloud storage provider).
Run updates, especially security updates, religiously. If minor OS upgrades concern you—and they’re really safe nowadays—wait a week and Google around to see if any one is reporting major snafus with the OS upgrade. For major OS upgrades, many Apple consultants will tell you to hold off until the “.1” release for Apple to catch extra bugs, not caught in beta testing.
Investigate Firewalls. Enable Apple’s firewall on your Mac (System Preferences > Security > Firewall), unless you’re behind another firewall which you control. Investigate your office’s networking devices for their firewall capabilities, and turn something on if it isn’t!
Seek out a VPN for use on the road—or anywhere outside your office. WiFi is just not terribly safe when you don’t know who’s near by or who’s running the system, like at hotels and coffeeshops. A Virtual Private Network will encrypt all your traffic between your Mac and your trusted endpoints (like known web sites).
Along with this, you should have a mobile phone that uses LTE and can share its connection with your other devices. Learn how to use your phone’s personal hotspot feature. The latest Apple operating systems make sharing a mobile data connection really simple. Once power is accounted for, there will be times when your LTE hotspot will be a better alternative to a WiFi connection. When you get your VPN squared away, set up your iOS devices to access the VPN as well, for when you’re on the road, but using WiFi for your devices. VPN over LTE is probably superfluous at this time, unless you’re working for a client who mandates VPN-only access. If it doesn’t negatively impact your data speed, though, it doesn’t hurt either.
Lastly, for all the services you don't personally control, for example, cloud backup, cloud storage, and VPN service, you should actually read their privacy policies. You need to make sure they're compatible with any policies your clients may have regarding their data. This is a good practice anyway. It is possible to run services like those described above from hardware you control. But that's far outside the scope of a minimum viable data protection essay.
The world is a dangerous place for data. Be careful out there.
Feel free to contact the author. He’s currently between actual blogs, because he’s bent on building one himself.