Background

Backing up data is important to me. Yeah, that’s putting it mildly. I’m not obsessed exactly, but when it comes to making sure I don’t lose my information, I probably take more steps than the average person. Especially, since my livelihood depends on it–you can’t publish books if you lose your manuscripts.

Here’s a breakdown of my former backup plan:

• I had an external Western Digital Hard Drive setup with Mac’s Time Machine. It performed incremental hourly backups as well as full backups every morning.
• A DropBox account that I used to save my Scrivener (writing software) backups to.
• In house server space where I frequently backed up my work manually.

This worked wonderfully. FOR TWO YEARS. And then it didn’t.

The Flaw In My Plan

My external hard drive had a partition on it. If you aren’t familiar with hard drive partitions, think of it this way: I split the hard drive space in half. I allocated one section for regular backups and another for pictures.

There was one problem, a fatal flaw in my backup plan.

• I was backing up my laptop’s hard drive regularly.
• I was not backing up my external hard drive.

So all of those pictures that I’d stored on a partition weren’t being stored anywhere else. And me, the over-the-top worrier when it comes to backups, didn’t see it. Until the external hard drive became corrupted. I could have kicked myself.

The Problem

My little Western Digital hard drive was a champ for a long time. Still, the challenge with tech is that is changes constantly. So what might work one day might not after the next update.

When Mac released a new operating system, El Capitan, it brought with it a glitch that doesn’t always allow users to properly eject external devices.

Are you starting to get an idea of how my external hard drive corrupted? I can almost envision when this happened. It was a Wednesday, I was in a hurry to leave and pick up my kids, I ejected the drive, and then pulled out the cable when the system didn’t respond.

The end result is that I pulled the USB cable out too early on the hard drive, and ended up with corrupted files. The oldest mistake in the book or one of them anyway.

What Made Me Lucky

So the drive was basically FUBAR (you can check Urban Dictionary for the definition since this is a family-friendly blog). There was one bright spot, however. The drive could still read all of the files. I could copy them off of the hard drive without any problem. It could have gone so many other ways.

The biggest problem really was the pictures. I need someplace to put them and back them up. Everything else was backed up and easily accessible.

Cloud Storage, Anyone?

After my hard drive backfire, I started kicking around different storage options. Check out my previous post on some common solutions HERE.

I wanted a more robust option, so I set aside my previous research and decided to try Own Cloud. Its a solution that more tech-savvy users can install on their own servers. It will then run incremental backups on your computer (i.e.it only backs up what’s changed). It even performs camera uploads via the Own Cloud app. Problem, solved, right?

Wrong. I installed Own Cloud set up the syncs. Started syncing. It notified me that it would take four months to complete my back up. Nice, huh? Apparently there is a known issue with Own Cloud and Mac.

I installed Own Cloud set up the syncs. Started syncing. It notified me that it would take four months to complete my back up.

Next!

Okay. Why not take a look at some of my other solutions? The Copy app by Barracuda offers more free storage than DropBox (15GB). I figured I would try and offload some of the pictures here temporarily. No dice. Again, we were talking 30 hours of syncing. That’s when Copy wasn’t crashing.

Next!

Then onto DropBox. I still love this tool, but there have been some sync delays on Mac. Plus, the $10 per month fee for increased space was something I’d been hoping to avoid. 7.8 GB also puts it way behind it’s competitors in terms of storage space.

Next!

I moved onto Google Drive. It seemed to do well handling my files. There didn’t appear to be any sync issues. The app was so easy to use and responsive–it also didn’t take 4 months to upload. Plus, with 30 GB free? How could I pass it up?

Oh, I should have.

Google Drive Decided To Not Play Well With Others

I thought I had my solution. I loaded everything that I’d need to back up into my Google Drive folder. The sync began and it was working great. It finished. I shut down my computer.

The next day, all hell broke loose.

Two things happened when I started up my Mac:

1. I received a message: “Where is Finder Sync API Extension.” This is apparently another known issue (I hate those) with Drive. Fine. Might as well get some work done while I consider my other options.
2. I went into Scrivener, tried to open an existing file, and it crashed. Again, and again, and again… Apparently, there is another known issue (grrrr, see what I mean?) with Scrivener and Google Drive that causes the .scrivx file (part of your Scrivener file) to corrupt.

At this point, I was ready to quit. I’m not lying. Did I mention I had to reinstall El Capitan twice because of permissions issues and a problematic install? These were fun times. I mean, this was happening at the tail end of 2015. How could 2016 ever hope to compare?

Why I May Have Been Right The First Time?

After all of that, and quite a bit of bad language on my part, I ended up with almost the exact same setup that I did the first time.

Here’s a breakdown of my new backup plan:

• I use an external Seagate 1TB Drive setup with Mac’s Time Machine. It performs incremental hourly backups as well as full backups every morning.
• I still save my Scrivener backups to DropBox.
• I still use the in-house server space where I frequently up my work.
• The bonus? The Seagate Drive came with 200GB of storage on Microsoft’s OneDrive. I immediately moved all of the pictures over to this location.

For now, this the best of both worlds. What the experience has taught me is that even those of us who think we’re diligent, may have forgotten something. I my case it was every picture of my kids in existence.

Tips For Protecting Your Data In 2016

• Take a screenshot shot of all of your files saved on your hard drive now.
• Print the screenshot and save it in a place you will remember. Those of you who are more technical can create print out from Terminal or by running a shell script–you know how.
• Verify what you need to backup and what you don’t. Be sure that everything is accounted for.
• You should have your data stored in at least two places. An external hard drive is a good choice because it’s usually cost-effective and can hold a large amount of data.
• You’ll also want to set up some sort of cloud storage-whether that’s Google Drive, One Drive, or something else is up to you. I’m considering Carbonite for my backups as well.
• Frequently run through your files and make sure everything is being accounted for.