One thing I have learned over the many years of using computers is that backing up is critical. Of course you never admit this until a system crash destroys some of your work, then you curse yourself for not having spent the time creating that backup. The other thing you learn from experience is that the harder something is to do, then the less likely it is to get done. Therefore a backup regime needs to be planned and implemented with simplicity and automation in mind.
For a couple of years now I have used a program called Oops!Backup on my PC. It is a great little program from a small developer that is keen on seeing their program mature into a reliable and stable platform for automated backups. It allows you to ‘travel back in time’ to not only recover current files, but also to retrieve earlier versions of documents, photos etc., prior to any changes you may have recently made.
Destination Captain?
The other aspect of backing up is which media you choose. DVD disks are the current ‘floppy’ of this computer generation, and as such they can be unreliable, as well as too small to hold significant amounts of data. Single harddrives are very cheap and spacious, but suffer from the same problem as the drive in your computer, ie., they can fail – thereby destroying your backup. For me the best solution was to use multiple harddrives that ‘backed each other up’ (that is they provided redundancy). One such solution is a NAS device (Network Attached Storage). You can choose NAS devices from simple single disk boxes to multiple drive storage units, they can come empty or loaded with new drives; and they can offer solutions from simple backup through to web and media servers.
I chose a 4 drive NAS box from QNAP (the TS-439 Pro Turbo). I wanted to have a large storage capacity with the ability to run my NAS in a way that would allow the disk drives to have some redundancy in case of drive failure. To do this I set my NAS up in a RAID 5 array using 4 x 1.5tB drives. Whilst the NAS has some complexities due to its very nature, the installation and setup of the RAID could not be easier. One of the features I love about utilising a NAS RAID 5 array is that if a harddrive fails, you can simply replace it and the NAS device will rebuild the array – therefore, built in redundancy.
Back to the future.
So it has been a relatively easy process for me to protect my families data using Oops!Backup and the QNAP NAS. But now I have a macbook what is the best way to backup this machine? Well, as you may or may not know, the current macintosh operating system, OSX Snow Leopard, has a utility called Time Machine. This program is very similar to my Oops!Backup described above, probably even more powerful, as it provides a method of reinstalling your entire mac not just the data files.
Apple sells a harddrive backup system that works seamlessly with Time Machine, imaginatively titled Time Capsule. At first I was very tempted to go down this path due to my recent enamour of anything apple. But applying cold hard logic I resisted (my wife would shake her head at that statement). After all, Time Capsule is still only a single drive and fraught with the perils of single harddrive failure listed above. Arguably, Time Capsule is much more than just a drive as it provides a full featured dual band wifi ‘n’ router with many other capabilities built in to it’s simple yet elegant apple construction. However, it really doesn’t make sense if you already own a storage device and a wifi modem/router.
I figured the best solution for me was to point my MacBooks time machine utility at my QNAP box. Searching the internet led me to all sorts of problems people were having with this simple idea, not just with QNAP but many other NAS devices as well. There was a lot of evidence that Time Machine required certain configurations of drive space allocated in specific ways that required a fair bit of use of the mac ‘terminal’ and ‘archaic’ scripting commands – very unix. Considering my last real venture into CLI (command line interface) territory was back in the days of modifying DOS autoexec.bat files about 15 years ago, I started wondering if I had bitten of more than I could chew.
In the end I gave up trawling the forums and decided to take the bull by the horns. I ran the Time Machine utility and tried to point it to my NAS. Unfortunately, failure. At this point I started thinking again about how good the Time Capsule device looked, elegant, smooth, aluminium, small, sexy
Thinking about things a little bit further, I thought I should just check the configuration of the NAS box to make sure I had everything correct. When I loaded up the QNAP Backup servers page, I realised I hadn’t enabled Time Machine support (DOH moment).
So a couple of seconds on the Time Machine configuration page allowed me to set aside half a terabyte of storage space specifically for my macbook (probably overkill) and activate this in such a way that it should be visible to my Time Machine. The QNAP utility makes all the changes required, including activating the Apple File System protocols required automatically.
Back to my Time Machine, and voila, there was the volume showing up in the select disk requester. The remainder of the setup process was straight forward as documented in the Time Machine guide. Time Machine now backs up my macbook each hour it is turned on and this happens seamlessly via wifi through my router. I haven’t tested replacing a missing file yet (mainly as I don’t have much data on this machine), but at some stage in the near future I will prove the concept and also attempt a full restoration of my new toy.




















