New Backup Plans

Well, the recent hard drive debacle forced me to reevaluate my backup strategies.  I have developed a three-phase plan.  Two are off-the-shelf Backup 3.1.1 plans, and I created the third from scratch.

Plan One: Personal Data & Settings
This daily plan works in two stages.  It backs up my Address Book, iCal calendars, Keychain, Safari settings, and application preferences to two locations: first to my iDisk, then to my local Firewire drive.  The backups are scheduled 30 minutes apart, though each only takes a few minutes, max.  The purpose(s) of this plan are (a) to keep vital settings in multiple locations, and (b) to keep the number of archived files low for quick recovery in the event of file corruption or accidental deletion.

Plan Two: Home Folder
As you may recall from the previous entry, the loss of my Home folder was the most catastrophic aspect of the event.  Innumerable documents and all the associated man-hours were lost.  This daily backup will hopefully prevent any such future tragedy.  Some of this is overkill, in that many of the files archived in Plan One will be copied again, but this is meant to be a comprehensive backup for a simple, one-step restore of my Home folder, should the situation arise.

Plan Three: Weekly Comprehensive: Users, Applications, Library
This is the plan I attempted to create last Saturday.  This weekly archive will contain the bulk of my hard drive (minus System files) in case of severe catastrophe.

Let me hear feedback, if you have any.