MIT

Personal Computing

Backup Solutions

STOA recommends using Code42 to all MIT students, faculty, and staff affiliated with the department. This is an automated solution that allows the user the flexibility to select individual folders or the default backup set, and then stores copies of those folders off-site, where they can be managed and retrieved as needed.

This is a superior method to manually copy and pasting files and folders to an external hard drive or public cloud (e.g. OneDrive, Dropbox). 

Ad Hoc

As a supplementary method of backing up your data, be sure to:

  • Not use flash drives for backups, and do not use them on public machines.
  • Keep the backups apart from your laptop (so that if laptop is lost in a fire or stolen, the backups aren’t lost with it).
  • Back-up physical media regularly, and store these apart from one another.
  • If copying files to hard drive, do not overwrite the previous backup. Keep multiple generations of backups so you can revert as needed.
  • Consider cloud storage options like Google Drive, iCloud or preferably an MIT-supported solution such as Dropbox and OneDrive, and automate this process if possible.

Automated

In addition to Code42, there is other software that will run incremental backups to local media (e.g. an external hard drive or backup drive), and those that run incremental backups to network volumes or cloud storage. An example of the former is Apple’s free ‘Time Machine‘ backup software which comes with OS X, while the latter applies to the OneDrive or Google Drive applications. 

Local Backups

  • This is the best way to backup large multimedia collections such as pictures, movies and music.
  • Macintosh: Time Machine is free, runs transparently in the background and is easy to restore from. All you need is an external hard drive.
  • Windows: As with Mac OS, we recommend using Microsoft’s native backup solution for Windows operating systems, Backup and Save.

Network (Off-site) Backups

We strongly recommend the use of Code42 for all MIT related work. For installation, please see here: http://ist.mit.edu/crashplan 

A note on Virtual Machines: Should you be using Virtual Machines (VMs) on your computer, then be sure to *exclude* them from backups. Our recommendation is to store all VMs in ~/Virtual Machines (where ‘~’ denotes your home directory), and then configure your backup client to exclude the entire ‘Virtual Machines’ directory. Please consult your backup documentation for details or drop by cron.