Time Machine - Part 1

 Ever since the great hard drive crash of 2014, I have been a big proponent of backing up data. I've used different methodologies in the past, including getting help from software. Currently I have two systems going. For pictures and video of the girls, I use a cloud service to back up that data. For that data and everything else, I have a mirrored hard drive. For pictures and videos that we take, they are then saved in three different locations. Everything else, including data from the internet and files we create such as spreadsheets, is saved twice. The way that I mirror the hard drive for my backup is where the problem lies.

I backup my system once per month. I figure that is enough time that if a crash happens, I haven't lost too much information while at the same time not driving myself crazy doing nonstop backups. Every month I plug in my backup drive, completely erase its contents, and copy my system in its entirety to the backup. I do this because it is easy and requires little manual input from my end. The problem with this method is that it leaves you vulnerable after you erase the backup drive if there are errors on the main drive. That is exactly what happened this past month.

At sometime during the past month, the main drive would not save files correctly. They were mostly JPEG files, and they acted like they save fine. But if you tried to access them, or move them in anyway (including to the trash), Finder would completely lockup, sometimes even forcing a system restart. So I was stuck. I had no way of removing the files. Apple's blog has documents about files like this, but none of the suggestions were helpful, though I didn't bother going to the terminal. In a very cumbersome manor, I was able to find the locations of the rogue files, and copy around them to the backup drive. But what if I could not have done that? I would have been screwed. 

After I had my backup saved again (I estimate I only lost a handful of files over the past month or so), I completely wiped my main drive to get rid of the rogue files and started from scratch. I was able to restore my main drive from my backup. Everything seems fine, but there is this thought of what if the main drive is trying to fail? We will see how it acts in the upcoming month or so. In the meantime, this situation has got me thinking of different strategies to backup my system. Strategies that do not involve completely wiping my backup every month, leaving me vulnerable to complete data loss. This is where Time Machine comes into the conversation.