Switcher

Today, a friend of Ven that is a fan of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates, read my blog and contest all I wrote about the simplicity of backuping and restoring with Mac.

It made me sad, because I’m not blogging to invite you to go to Mac way, albeit I think it’s a good way to envisage even if you are using Windows & Microsoft products everyday. It made me sad that people refuse the experience of the other, on their day-to-day use, as just a matter of fact.

And backup, true backup, with the ability to restore the whole OS, with any settings, each and every applications, with their own settings, all you personal data, and every service or downloaded software or bookmark, and email too. And to restore that in a matter of an hour or a couple of.

From my experience with Windows, where I reinstalled Windows every 6 months, to clean-up everything including the Windows Registry (kinda pain in the ass), I could tell you, this is awesome to be able to swap drive on a laptop an be up-and-running within an hour or two, using free tools or OS tools.

On Windows, it took me more than a full hard day (working from the day before at night, to the next night on Windows), and on Mac OS X it’s a matter of an hour or less than 2 hours, without being involved during the whole process. It’s valuable, especially if you think your time is, or more if you sell your work hourly.

That’s a point for Mac OS X, because I spent 20 hours per years doing that on Windows, something that may cost me more than $1000 each year in lost time, as a consultant, and something Mac OS X done for me on lunch time or during the night. It’s valuable.

General, Windows backup, carcon copy cloner, time machine

Finally for my hard-drive upgrade, I choose the easy way, to backup before (twice) and restore just thereafter.

Backup(s)

I have a live backup with TimeMachine on an Airport-connected Hard-drive, it’s unsupported but functional and unmatched in the Windows world!

I choose to do a bootable backup on an external USB 2.5inch hard-drive, with Carbon Copy Cloner, to be able to restart even in case of a failure or anything, booting directly from the USB drive (still unmtached in Windows )

Restore

My first, and unique restore, has been done booting from my external USB2 2.5inch hard-drive (LaCie Porsche 160GB), booting from it, launching Carbon Copy Cloner, and copying this live backup to my new internal hard-drive. One hour and I restored a full live Mac OS X, with my applications, my OS X settings, each settings of the application, and running.

Also totally unmatched on Windows

To Resume

Do a good backup using Carbon Copy Cloner, restore after hard-drive swap, and you will be up and running in a matter of hours, and this is the kinda tricks that made me choose Mac OS X over Windows!

General backup, carbon copy cloner, ccc, hard drive upgrade, restore

BackBlaze presented an online backup system similar to TimeMachine but totally online, with a well-designed security, and recovery options:

On the security side, your datas are transmitted over SSL encryption, disabling anyone to get them on the net, and the ability to encrypt them by a private key to be sure that even in case of Blaze system’s being hacked, your datas will stay encrypted and safe. Nice point!

On the recovery side, it naturally offers the ability to recover any file you are saving, with a good interface, but there’s an alternative to retrieve hundreds of gigabyte of datas in case of lost computer, fire, stolen computer or hard-disk total failure: they send you a USB hard-drive with your full backup set inside! Great!

It even let you backup on the road, on an hotel, anywhere in the world, or recover your files from any location. I will be happy if they add a web interface to enable access to your files from a single browser (cybercoffee, hotel, etc).

All that for $5/month ($50/year), except for the recovery hard-drive, at 200$ with a night delivery, price tag is really correct!

There’s some drawbacks, naturally, the price seems high for home-user, with $150/3 years, the price tag of a 1TB backup hard-drive with the speed of local hard-drive instead internet communication (200X faster average!).

And talking about speed, on my high-speed cable Internet access, when I put 15GB of Photos inside my laptop (a day of shooting sessions), it will takes less than 15 minutes to backup them on an USB2 external hard-drive, but more than 2 days (and probably 3 or 4) to backup by Internet, letting the laptop always connected, without any pause, it’s irrealistic!

So BackBlaze is a real great backup system, but not targeted at user that have huge multimedia files (or huge files), and it may be real great for SOHO or mid-size companies to outsource their backups with flexibility!

General backblaze, backup, online backup, time machine