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World Backup Day
31 March 2023
It's World Backup Day again and we'd be remiss not to issue a public service announcement. We backup everything every day these days because, as Scarlett says in Gone With the Wind (which was the greatest movie ever about data loss), "Tomorrow is another day."
You'll need two things to celebrate: some physical storage and backup software. We'll elaborate.
BACKUP DRIVES
You'll find a lot of World Backup Day sales today on SanDisk, Samsung, Crucial, LaCie, Sony and WD portable drives and Synology network-attached storage appliances.
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, updated in February with a couple of new features. 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.
BONUS: A TIME MACHINE LINK
The Mirror Mirror distribution includes two links to Apple's Time Machine backup utility, which also relies on rsync.
Mirror Mirror itself includes a button to start a Time Machine backup on demand. We found that helpful when we were doing irregular Time Machine backups.
But the distribution also includes a Keyboard Maestro macro to run a scheduled backup once a day. Time Machine is either backing up all the time or or demand but this macro makes it possible to schedule a nightly backup once a day.
That's what we do now in addition to our on-demand Mirror Mirror backups of smaller projects.
See the documentation for the details on setting up a once-nightly Time Machine backup with the macro.