You can't have too many backups for Mac hard drives

I've written in this column about the importance of having a good, reliable backup of your computer's data. Of course, you know it's a good idea, but backing up is like flossing: you know you should be doing it regularly, but something more important or interesting to do often comes up instead. And besides, your data won't get lost, right? That happens to other people.

Well, count me among those hapless folks, because recently the hard drive in my wife's MacBook abruptly died. One moment it was streaming music, and in the next, the music stopped and the drive made a very loud clicking noise.

My experience getting the MacBook operating again shows that having just one backup isn't always enough — and that it is possible to recover from a catastrophic hardware failure like this.

Take an inventory. My first action was to check the backups. I keep multiple backups for redundancy, but even so, the timing was such that I didn't have a single, recent backup of the MacBook's data.

I make duplicates of my machines' hard disks using SuperDuper (www.shirt-pocket.com), copying the data to bare internal hard disks (which cost less than $100) and a NewerTech Voyager Q (www.macsales.com) hard drive dock. Unfortunately, the most recent dupe was two weeks old; the other duplicate at my office was more than a month old. (Bad home-system administrator!)

The lag is mostly attributable to the fact the MacBook stays in the living room, where a chunky external hard disk and cables are not welcome. To fill in the gap, I had set up an Apple Time Capsule (www.apple.com/timecapsule) to store a continuing wireless Time Machine backup.

That data, however, was over a week old. The MacBook had started acting extremely slow, so I turned off Time Machine to see if perhaps the hourly network backup was the cause. (I don't think it was.) Even so, that put the most recent recoverable data at just one week — an inconvenience, but workable.

But there was one more piece of the puzzle: I had also installed Mozy (www.mozy.com) on that machine, which backed up a subset of my wife's data (primarily her Documents and Desktop folders and e-mail) over the Internet. Checking in online, I saw that the last backup had occurred 9 hours before the crash.

Restore the data. The MacBook's hard drive was dead, so I ordered a replacement online, a 320 GB laptop hard drive that cost $70. I also removed the dead drive, which, I must exclaim to the heavens, is fantastically easy to do on the original MacBook: You remove the battery, unscrew three screws and remove a bracket along the edge of the bay, and then simply slide out the hard drive. Newer Mac laptops require that you remove the entire bottom panel, which exposes the hard drive in a similarly accessible way.

I inserted the oldest duplicate hard drive into the Voyager drive dock and connected that to the MacBook. That would become the laptop's temporary hard disk until the new drive arrived in a few days.

Next I connected the laptop to the Time Capsule via Ethernet (for faster transfer than wireless) and started up the computer using a Mac OS X install disc. Although I wasn't reinstalling the operating system, the installer includes the option to restore a drive from a Time Machine backup. I used it to format the external drive and restore the data from the Time Capsule.

Lastly, I used Mozy to recover the remaining data that had changed or been added in the week after I had turned off Time Machine. Unfortunately, although I was able to get the data, I can't recommend Mozy. Repeated efforts to download the data using the built-in software failed. I had to use the awkward Web interface to choose which files to restore, and then had to wait several hours before Mozy e-mailed a link to a downloadable file. I did get the data eventually, but it was frustrating.

The interim result was the MacBook, being run from an external drive containing data that was current until 9 hours before the crash. Aside from the fact that my wife couldn't move the laptop away from the dining room table for several days, she was able to use it as she had before.

When the new drive arrived, I installed it (again, almost trivially easy to do), used SuperDuper to clone the contents of the external drive onto the new internal drive, and all was well.

I realize this sounds complicated. If I hadn't turned off Time Machine I could have saved some steps. But I also want to show that having just one hard-drive backup, although better than nothing, isn't always enough to ensure the safety of your data.

And that's the most important part of all this. Are you willing to lose all of your digital photos forever? Your financial information? I hope not.

Jeff Carlson and Glenn Fleishman write the Practical Mac column for Personal Technology and about technology in general for The Seattle Times and other publications. Send questions to carlsoncolumn@mac.com. More Practical Mac columns at www.seattletimes.com/ columnists.