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It's World Backup Day
31 March 2022
Just a friendly reminder that it's World Backup Day. You'll need two things to celebrate: some physical storage and backup software.
BACKUP DRIVES
B&H is having a one-day World Backup Day Sale, expiring at 11:59 p.m. tonight on SanDisk, Samsung, Crucial, LaCie, Sony and WD portable drives.
B&H Sale. Pick your favorite brand. It's on sale today only.
We rely on WD Passport drives. They're small, inexpensive and easy to find.
SOFTWARE
There are many ways to copy your files to a backup device. We use Time Machine regularly on both our production machines. But our favorite utility to backup multiple projects is the free FreeFileSync [MW], which we reviewed in 2020.
The major backups those utilities perform are invitations to step away from the computer while they run. But we more often just want to copy some working files to a second storage device as insurance.
For that we prefer our free Keyboard Maestro macro Mirror Mirror for macOS. It is always loaded (as a macro) and makes it easy to back up our valuables on any device, including cloud servers.
Mirror Mirror. Safely harness rsync to copy and restore your data.
The macro uses the built-in backup utility rsync to mirror any directory or single file in a Target location. Changes made to the Source will be reflected in the Target location, effectively making an archive of the Source.
After the initial backup, which takes as long as any copy, only the changes are executed, which is much faster than a fresh copy. New files are copied, deleted files are deleted.
A log shows what was done and how long it took.
You can save and delete commands. You can also restore a Target to its Source from any saved command.
There are two downloads to the package:
- Mirror Mirror: This 6K download is the macro itself, which you double click to install into Keyboard Maestro.
- Documentation: You can read the five-page 162K PDF online (just click the link).
The macro does require Keyboard Maestro, the indispensable macOS utility. You can buy it at a discount from Stairways Software for $28.80 (regularly $36.00) and help support this site at the same time.