Internal Clone is OK? BU Strategy General Question

[Loopy C]

Sorry I searched but did not see anything specific to my question.

I have a new Mac Pro (Nehalem) and in planning it's back-up strategy want to know if there is any issues/downside to having a 'clone' on the internal bus (in my case it would be a second WD 1 Tb drive in bay 2 cloning the WD 1 Tb system disk in bay 1).

I suppose all my 'Open With' (Services') will be duplicated in the menus? Is a good strategy to have it internal or better to go external? This is a home system and in the past on my laptop I always did 'external Firewire' for obvious reasons...just want to check before making any drive (and secondary Super Duper license) purchases.

Thanks in advance.

[dnanian]

No real disadvantages other than the fact that damage to the Mac (e.g. a power supply failure) would take out both drives rather than just the source... I find it better to try to get as much redundancy as possible when making a backup...

[Loopy C]

Thanks for advice ;-)

When you say 'takes them both out', have you then seen a common occurrence of the power supply going bad actually ruining the drive(s) or are you simply stating as an overall possibility in a more, overall bullet-proof plan.

The reason I ask is both the desk real estate and cost are something I am struggling with now and have myself never had the power supply destroy the drive but my use and experience is most probably quite modest compared to yours so want to consider carefully any/all of your advice in proper context.

Again (and always), thanks in advance ;-)

[dnanian]

An overall possibility. A backup plan needs to consider many things...

[Loopy C]

Thanks ;-)

[moite]

Theft is also another item to consider with internal/external.

Maybe a tower's a little less easy to get away with than with than a laptop like mine, but I try and add redundancy by locking the external HDD down to the desk (a LaCie d2 with a kensington lock, looped around my metal desk leg).

My hope is that the thief is semi-rational and will take the easy-to-steal-and-higher-value laptop and won't bother with a slightly-harder-to-take locked down HDD which has all my data cloned to it.

Of course, then there's the offsite side of a BU scheme to cover against local disaster such as fire, which I have as yet to fully sort out (annoying to have to cycle offsite HDDs around, and bloody mac iDisk doesn't seem to like to transfer anything more than a few MBs at a time or I'd use it to backup my basic docs using SuperDuper and a disc image! Well it didn't work last time I tried, maybe it's worth trying again...). That being said, my assessment is that local disaster is not as likely as drive failure and theft, which are also easier to guard against. I would like to have a little bit more piece of mind with an offsite, but that will happen one day. Given that I have e-mails back to the mid-90s you may be able to tell that I'm not one to dispose of any data lightly

[sjk]

Originally Posted by dnanian

A backup plan needs to consider many things...

Indeed, e.g.:

More than you wanted to know about backups | Chuqui 3.0

[dnanian]

That's a nice post from Chuq, with a lot of good advice.

[Loopy C]

Thanks all! I will peruse and digest before making next move/purchase ;-)

[sjk]

Followup to the post I linked to earlier:

Following my own advice on backups…. | Chuqui 3.0