This post by Decryption got me thinking (and searching, I couldn't find a previous thread on this), out of the people who do regular backups, how many actually test the backup to see how you would fare if disaster struck? It seems obvious to do when you think about it, but I know I maybe would test once every 6 months, if that!

How often others check their backups?
- Bez

PS The other thing that got me thinking about this is we just got a ReadyNAS Duo in our lab for data backup. When IT assigns an IP to the bugger I will let you all know how it goes with the likes of time machine.

I boot from the backup to another machine to check it about one time in 3.

Yes I test my backups it no good to backup if you can't restore from them.

Yes, this is a good point to make.
I recently checked a bootable HD copy I made with SuperDuper and it didnt work.

I test every backup immediately after doing it. Yes, I'm that dedicated.

Speaking of which, what is the best tool for imaging a Mac like Ghost or Acronis Truimage would do. I.e. plug in a recovery disk and let it recreate the machine exactly as it used to be? I backup files all business files to RAID but I wouldn't mind doing the odd image to save me installation time.

This is a really good point, I never check my backups... but I sure will now.

Thanks again.

Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper. The latter is free if you don't need to have timed backups.

A client of mine discovered, after a hard drive failure, that Apple's backup.app had made useless backups - ie: You couldn't restore them, except by manually opening every backup image and copying across the files. He's paranoid about testing his Time Machine backups after that incident. I backup to two places at least as I've seen more than once a backup drive fail right after the main drive failed.

I test my SuperDuper system backup immediately. I backup my work-in-progress at least twice a week, backup all completed jobs to DVD, twice, storing one in the office and one in a separate building. And I perform a random check of a couple of files in each backup to ensure they work.

Anal? No! Been through a fire that destroyed a studio? Yes! It's not fun when all computers, all external hdds, all Syquest and optical cartridges (yes it was in the 90s) are melted blobs.

MissionMan - I think more than a few people here would point you to SuperDuper - I make a clone to an external firewire disk and can boot from it and operate a complete copy of my system on any mac - albeit a little slower than an internal drive.

You can forget about doing this.

Yes, there is a 'defaultswrite' tweak that you can do to re-enable this feature, but Apple turned off remote-share support for Time Machine backup locations for a reason. If there is even the slightest network interruption to data flow during a Time Machine backup operation, and Time Machine does not receive the proprietry "whoops, please send that last packet to me again" signal, you will corrupt the entire Time machine sparseimage.

At the moment, the only remote devices which will work correctly with Time Machine are the Time Capsule, an Airport Express with the very latest AirDisk software, and Mac OS X Server 10.5.2.

But the time capsule must get around this somehow surely? The plan originally was to do the 'defaultswrite' tweak...

EDIT: just noticed the word 'proprietary'

Backups? What are backups?

I just bought a Time Capsule, should arrive tomorrow - then, sir, I will have backups

I have multiple backups, including a bootable one using SuperDuper. I always test the bootable one straight after doing it, and sometimes test a random selection of files on the non-bootable backups. But it is impossible to test every file you back up, so to a large degree you have to take it on faith.

Taking it on faith is a little dangerous. I know of a couple of customers who have tested backups in the same method mentioned above only to find out their backups don't work properly when they need them.

Consider the cost exercise in redoing an entire data migration for a customer who knows their data is now 6 months out of date and they have lost 6 months of their data, and these are on production systems with "so called" experts running them. These experts should have been shot for not doing basics tasks they were required to do.

Backups are weird, if they can fail, they will. I've tested ghost and numerous windows based products and found not all backups are successful all the time.

On the other hand, what do you do? Just keep a spare machine around for restoring data do for when you need to test backups? Not feasible for a home user. Its a tough position to be in.

I trust Time Machine - and my way of "checking" it, is by using it