More robust mac backups: full, distributed backup without sending gigabytes of traffic over the internet

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I have a dream:

Alice and Bob and I are friends/co-hackers and trust each other, and we all have mac laptops. Whenever any of us are in range of each other, our laptops silently back themselves up to each other. One day, my laptop explodes! Luckily, I'm unharmed. But I have a deadline later today! No problem, I grab Alice's laptop and log in as me and voila! I can't even tell I'm not on my own machine. Later I get a fresh new laptop and transfer my image to it from Alice's computer.

Why not just use Time Machine with an external drive that you plug in at night? A few reasons my dream solution is better:

  1. If I'm near Alice and Bob all the time, then I get more frequent backups. I don't lose a day's work when my computer dies.
  2. I could mitigate that by carrying around the external drive, but that defeats much of the purpose of a backup. What if I lose both the laptop and the drive?
  3. I want to set it up so I don't have to remember to do anything at all, even plug in a drive.
  4. With 3 friends doing this, we all get redundant backups without purchasing any hardware.

Has anyone hacked up anything like this?

dreeves

Posted 2009-10-26T21:53:48.173

Reputation: 841

Nice dream. At least having "documents" doing that would be awesome! – cregox – 2010-02-27T15:44:01.037

My friends will either kill me or stop being my friends if I dump my hard drive contents on their machines. Nothing wrong with the content itself, but the amount of data. If you just want to mirror selected folders with your most important stuff, a bit of source code or documents you write, cloud solutions such as Dropbox, Arq, etc. have shown that they work well. – Daniel Beck – 2010-10-30T11:23:18.520

Answers

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Most Mac laptop users I know wouldn't have enough space to keep a copy of my data in their computers. I certainly wouldn't like to waste space on other people's data on my laptop hard disk.

But it is not a bad idea at all, apart from this disk space problem.

Sergio Acosta

Posted 2009-10-26T21:53:48.173

Reputation: 363

So that's what terabyte hard drives are for. I was just thinking today, one would probably fail for most people before they got around to filling it up. Of course, 1 TB laptop hard drives aren't common (or do they even exist?). – Nathaniel – 2009-10-28T00:20:02.973

Asked: 2009-10-26T21:53:48.173

Viewed: 198 times

Active: 2009-10-28T00:16:48.027