A huge chunk of Toy Story 2 was indeed deleted and was only recovered by a stroke of luck and the intense efforts of the Pixar staff.

But what most people don’t know is that the whole movie was actually tossed out again, not by the computers, but by the filmmakers themselves. It was then completely remade with mere months to go before a release date that was set in stone, cementing Pixar’s legacy as a crucible of commitment to quality.

The story that Jacob shared with me ended up containing some interesting lessons for people working with large amounts of technical data, but more than that, it has a lot to say about just how much of what makes Pixar’s movies so great has to do with the people who work there and their insane dedication to making things great.

Full iPhone and iPad Access

Save iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch app data, voicemail, text messages, iMessages, call log, notes, contacts, music and photos to your Mac.

This topic contains answers to many common, general questions about Time Machine.
It does not, however, cover diagnosis and correction of specific problems or errors.  See Time Machine - Troubleshooting  for such help.
For questions and problems specific to Time Capsules, see Using Time Machine with a Time Capsule.  General problems with Time Capsules are covered in Apple’s  Time Capsule  forum.

So with so much dependency on all this, I knew I needed to save this stuff. If Pinboard disappeared tomorrow, I need a way to access this stuff I’m saving. Maciej Ceglowski, developer of Pinboard, gives you the option at any time to export all your items as HTML, XML, or JSON. Data portability is good. However, there’s no automated option to do this.

So I came up with a way to automate everything. This is an idiot’s guide to do it, since I’m by no means a pro at this stuff - I just poke around until I can make it work.

Automatically keep a copy of your project up-to-date on an external drive or a file server.

Designed not to make heavy demands on your computer's resources, CrashPlan's default settings trade speed for quiet, background operation. There are times, however, especially during a first backup, when you decide speed is more important. Here are some temporary adjustments that allow backups to complete faster, as well as some items to consider before changing any settings.

TimeMachineEditor is a software for Mac OS X Leopard, Snow Leopard and Lion that lets you change the default one-hour backup interval of Time Machine.
You can change the interval or create a more sophisticated scheduling (see screenshot below).
 
This is useful if you don’t need to backup every hour and don’t want the performance penalty. This is also especially useful if you manipulate lots of data within one hour as you would spend the whole day backing up.

And it turns out I was right: Backify was too good to be true.

I just got an email that they are no longer a reseller of LiveDrive and you even don't have access to the your backups. The irony is off course that yesterday my hard drive crashed and I had a backup of all my ebooks on it...

Note that the problems related to dedupe/compression observed in this post were fixed by CrashPlan in the 3.03 software release in March of 2011.  As of March, 2011, the problems with CogentCo remain problematic (limits of 300-500 Kbps through CogentCo vs. 3 Mbps + through any other route).
 
The recent comments in a forum thread at CrashPlan re: compression / deduplication and CPU usage prompted me to run a series of tests with different configuration settings to see how/if it impacted upload speeds to CrashPlan Central (their online backup archive).  Below are the details on the tests I performed as well as the results.

It has been about two months since I started using CrashPlan to backup all of my data to the cloud. A few weeks ago I wrote the article – CrashPlan and Why The Cloud Makes Sense - to highlight my initial experiences as well as provide an overview of what CrashPlan has to offer. My initial backup set was 1.8TB and it took about 7 weeks to finish. During that time throughput was all over the map. Most of the time it was 1.5Mbps or less. For several weeks it rarely got above 700-800Kbps. That is until a couple of weeks ago when I changed the Data De-duplication configuration from Automatic to Minimal…

On Lion only, to make recent backups available to Time Machine users while travelling or otherwise away from their backups, Time Machine may make "Local Snapshots" hourly.
These snapshots are made only on portable Macs, and are kept on the Mac's internal HD (and on any other disks/partitions being backed-up) for a few days, space permitting.

If you’ve ever had to restore an iOS device from its iTunes backup—for example, if you’ve upgraded to a new phone, or if Apple has replaced an iPhone that was having problems—there’s a good chance you’ve come across one of the most frustrating bugs in the iTunes/iOS 4 system: Much of your painstakingly created Home-screen organization is wiped out. Specifically, most of your third-party apps are no longer on the screens where you placed them, and while a few of your folders may remain, even those are missing most of their original contents (which are instead scattered across various screens).

With BackupLoupe you are able to answer questions like
Why is Time Machine so slow?
Why is my Time Machine drive already full?
Which files are actually being backed up?
Has a particular file/folder been backed up at all?
How many revisions of a file/folder exist in Time Machine?
A file/folder was deleted accidentally. When did this happen and where is the latest backup?
Is my backup drive big enough? Should I consider buying a larger one? And if yes, when?
In addition BackupLoupe provides intuitive ways to restore any item backed up by Time Machine to any location or exclude directories from future backups.

Following the release of Drush 4 and picking up on a couple of suggestions made by Moshe Weitzman and Nick Thompson on my previous Drush 3 Automated backup post, it was time for a revised post.

Drush 4 makes it really REALLY easy to backup all your sites, no more bash scripting etc.

I mentioned earlier on Twitter that my home computer downloaded a 22 GB database dump every three days as part of Instapaper’s backup method, and a lot of people expressed interest in knowing the full setup.

The code and database are backed up separately. The code is part of my regular document backup which uses a combination of Time Machine, SuperDuper, burned optical discs, and Backblaze.

The database backup is based significantly on MySQL replication. For those who aren’t familiar, it works roughly like this:

The “master” database is configured to write a binary log (“binlog”) of every change it makes to the data.
A snapshot of the entire database is taken, noting the current position in the binlog, and copied to the “slave” server.
The slave server can then start itself up with that snapshot, knowing what binlog position it needs to start from, and continuously stream the binlog data from the master, replicating every change that the master makes, to keep itself up to date.
And the binlogs can be decoded, edited, or replayed against the database however you like. This is incredibly powerful: given a snapshot and every binlog file since it was taken, you can recreate the database as it was at any point in time, or after any query, between the time it was taken and the time your binlogs end.

Suppose your last backup was at binlog position 259. Someone accidentally issued a destructive command, like an unintentional DELETE or UPDATE without a WHERE clause on a big table, at binlog position 1000. The database is now at position 1200 (and you don’t want to lose the changes since the bad query).

Backup You Can Count On
Arq backs up the critical files on your Mac to the Internet.

Your backups are stored at Amazon S3 ("Simple Storage Service"), the gold standard of reliable online storage in the industry, backed by Amazon.com, a large stable company.

Backups of your Mac are complete and accurate, including all "metadata" -- something that many other online backup offerings can't claim (see results).

My theory detailed above is only one piece of the puzzle: with backup, automation is king.
Fortunately VMware Fusion 2 and later come with a vmrun command that gives us a basis to automate the taking of snapshots for backup purposes.
Here’s a small Ruby script that dynamically discovers all running VMs, creating a new snapshot unimaginatively named “backup snapshot”, deleting any old snapshots if present:

Yesterday, the SSD startup drive in my OS X MacBook became extensively corrupted, such that the computer would no longer boot from it. The process of recovering and repairing the drive revealed a number of important lessons related to recovery preparedness.

As an alternative to the previously reviewed Mozy, I prefer CrashPlan for offsite data storage. It’ll back you up to external hard drives, or computers on your network, or flat-rate cloud storage, but its great innovation is the ability to back up over the internet, with permission, to another CrashPlan user. This is terrific for maintaining your own automatic offsite backups between work and home, or spreading backup religion to friends and family. All you need is broadband and spare disk space.

Apples utvecklarinformation om hur att använda Apple Software Restore. (Kanske gammal sida?)

En artikel om Apple Software Restore, ett verktyg för att ta backup i OS X.

Apples egen text om hur man bör och kan göra backuper från kommandoraden i Mac OS X.

Ett tips på macosxhints om att installera och använda rdiff-backup (framförallt handlar det om att installera det genom DarwinPorts).

PCWorld testar backuplösningar på hårddiskar, externa direktanslutna, NAS-enheter och även onlineservicer.