Backups revisited - trouble in paradise
Adam Turner's quest for the ultimate backup regime isn't going as planned.
A few weeks ago I outlined my laborious backup regime for Windows and my efforts to recreate it on a Mac. It's not going well, because several highly respected Mac backup tools seem to hate me.
Online backups are fine, with Jungle Disk faithfully uploading my documents into Amazon's S3 storage service each night. SuperDuper also seems to be fine for creating backup images of my operating system partition. Even Apple's MobileMe is behaving itself, keeping the calendar and contacts in sync on my iPhone and MacBook. The problem revolves around making regular incremental backups of my documents to my network drive, an Apple Time Capsule.
Originally I was going to use Time Machine to back up my documents to the Time Capsule, but there's no way to limit the amount of space the backups consume and it would eventually take up the entire drive. The fact that these backups are locked away in the Time Capsule image is also a hassle as, now my wife has embraced Facebook, she needs access to our photo backups on the Time Capsule.
I decided to try ChronoSync, a file-level Mac backup tool. ChronoSync is well-respected, and loyal users seem to swear by it, but I got no love from it.
ChronoSync crippled my MacBook. The computer would grind to a halt several times a day and there was lots of weirdness going on, such as the Finder crashing. Several times I couldn't even reboot and I had to pull the battery from the MacBook. It was like moving back to Windows again. Since I uninstalled ChronoSync, the MacBook hasn't missed a beat.
Even when it did work, ChronoSync was painfully slow. I'm backing up about 50GB of data and it would take hours to scan for changes before it even started backing up. Even then the backups were painfully slow. I tried breaking up my backup regime into manageable chunks, but it didn't help much. It was hard to tell whether ChronoSync was working at all, and the software couldn't even get its act together and email me to tell me the backups had failed.
After abandoning Chronosync I experimented with Synk, which offers "zeroscan technology". This allows Synk to keep track of document changes as you work, similar to Time Machine, meaning after the initial scan it doesn't need to waste time scanning before each incremental backup. Zeroscan sounds great, but if you read the fine print you discover it resets when you reboot the machine so you need to do the initial scan again (in my case taking several hours).
Synk also seemed to choke on my large backup data sets, even when I broke them down to more manageable chunks. Frustratingly, Synk doesn't email you a report so you know how your backup went. Synk and ChronoSync also had issues with mounting the Time Capsule, which is quite possibly an Apple issue. I also noticed that occasionally the Time Capsule slowed to a crawl when I tried manually copying files directly to or from the network drive. Rebooting the Time Capsule seemed to fix the problem.
I'm not saying these applications are crap, I'm just saying they wouldn't play nicely for me. The whole experience has put a dampener on my "Macs just work" philosophy, but I intend to persevere. Somewhere out there is the right backup tool for me.
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