Modern Mac users have no excuses for losing data, and yet too many lose irreplaceable digital photographs, home movies, and personal and work documents, due to having a blasé attitude to backing up, or thinking hard drives are somehow immune from technical problems.
But the harsh reality is this: data you're not backing-up at least once - and preferably twice - is data you don't care about.
Although backing-up was perhaps once an arcane, laborious process, that's far from the truth for today's Mac user.
Aside from the available hardware solutions, in Finder, you can burn any folder to disc via the relevant option in the File menu, or create a 'burn folder', drag content to it and within minutes have a back-up of important data to file away in a drawer. (iTunes and iPhoto also have user-friendly back-up options for making disc-based copies of media: File > Library > Back Up to Disc... and Share > Burn, respectively.)
Back in time
Users of Leopard also have access to Time Machine. This application can back-up your documents in the background, even keeping multiple copies of your work, so you can retrieve accidentally deleted items.
To get started with Time Machine, all you need to do is plug in an external hard drive - preferably one that has 50% more storage than your Mac's internal drive. (1TB drives are now available for as little as £70, and so if you can afford a Mac, you can afford a back-up drive.) A dialog box will appear and once you click 'Use as Backup Disk', Time Machine will get on with backing-up.
Be mindful, though, that Time Machine is not a solution that creates a bootable back-up. In the event of a hard-drive failure, you'll need your Mac OS X installation disc along with the back-up drive to restore your system. If you feel that's too slow for recovery, applications exist to create a clone of your Mac's drive, enabling you to get up and running extremely quickly.
Send in the clones
A hard-drive clone is an exact copy of your Mac's internal drive. Should your Mac's drive keel over, you can restart, hold Option, select the clone and boot from it. Your down-time is however long that process takes - perhaps a minute or two - although you'll of course lack files created or amended since the last back-up. If your data is critical, we recommend backing up with Time Machine to one drive and also creating a clone, for the best of both worlds.
One final note: Macs happily read to and write from various hard drive formats, but most drives initially arrive in a format intended for Windows, which may not result in a bootable Mac drive when cloned to. Therefore, when you buy your new external hard drive, reformat it. Connect it to your Mac, launch Disk Utility, click the 'Partition' tab, select '1 Partition' from 'Volume Scheme', and from the 'Options' button, select 'GUID Partition Table' if you've an Intel Mac or 'Apple Partition Map' if you've a PowerPC Mac.
MAC FRIENDLY: Reformat new hard drives if they come with a partition scheme that's more suitable for Windows
The Mac OS X back-up top five
1. Time Machine (part of Mac OS X, £83)
If you've got Leopard, you should be using Time Machine. The app costs nothing, works fairly well, and can provide access to previously deleted documents.
2. SuperDuper! ($27.95)
Utterly dependable, SuperDuper! is a first-rate cloning solution that works on any Tiger or Leopard Mac system.
Read TechRadar's SuperDuper! review.
3. Carbon Copy Cloner (donationware)
A strong rival to SuperDuper!, Carbon Copy Cloner is actually superior for scheduling and partial drive copies (such as cloning folder to folder), and has versions that work on Mac OS X 10.2+.
Read TechRadar's Carbon Copy Cloner review.
4. Twin (about £42)
Newcomer Twin offers plenty of flexibility, enabling you to copy a disk or folder to a local volume, FTP or Amazon S3.
5. Carbonite ($55 per year)
For the truly cautious, off-site back-up provides an extra layer of security. Carbonite is a top offering in this field, providing an automated and Mac-like experience.
Read TechRadar's Carbonite review.
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Your comments (4) Click to add a new comment
dm22
August 1st
4. There's also ArchiveMac. The idea is to archive big files and directories to DVD so that you can free up space and not have to backup so much stuff.
If its important, its always a good idea to have multiple copies & backups.
TimeMachine for backup is essential. Not sure why anyone wouldn't use it. Its saved me many times.
Mozy is also a good alternative to Carbonite, similar price.
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a.n.other
July 31st
3. You can also create bootable clones with Disk Utility. But seriously people, use freeken Time Machine.
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tremolux66
July 31st
2. I've been using Super Duper! for several years and have been quite pleased with it. The vendor support has been excellent (e.g., they suggested a workable method for backing up and restoring a failing hard drive when the motherboard was also failing -- a tricky situation). I currently use Super Duper! to create bootable clones of my hard drives and use Time Machine to capture incremental changes between full backups -- a very good (and inexpensive) solution.
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alancookie
July 31st
1. I have been using CrashPlan (www.crashplan.com) and have found it useful in my backup strategy (in addition to using CarbonCopyCloner for disk images). For personal use, you can use it on up to 10 computers at no cost with the ability to backup to an external drive or off-site (free if you have a friend who will share some disk space).
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