Hi, have an eMac 700Mhz 120 GB HD and have no backup plan. Would like to keep it as simple as possible. Have Intego Backup X5 guess the most simple would be to buy a 150 GB HD 400 Firewire? Thought about cloud storage but it was so slow. Ideally would like cloud storage, its ideal but can this machine do it and be practical? Looking for input from you all, this machine is slow but it does what I want it to do and its paid for!
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Backing Up eMac
- Thread starter landlover
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I would do as you indicate, buying a drive to backup to. You can use Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper to do a nightly backup (or whatever fits your schedule). That would make the backup bootable.
If you have Leopard (you didn't mention what OS you have) you can use Time Machine.
Both Time Machine and CCC and Super Duper will allow a bare metal restore in a bootable condition. There are more expensive options such as Retrospect, but you'd have to find a PowerPC version and getting Retrospect to bare metal restore is an involved process.
Other backup options, such as Sugarsync, Dropbox, etc won't have anywhere near the capacity of your HD, unless you purchase a plan with them. And all that would be is backup. You couldn't do a bare metal restore from backup with those.
If you do not know what I mean by "bare metal restore," well here it is. Say your drive dies and all you have now is your backup. A bare metal restore allows you to grab a new hard drive, install it, restore from the backup and be right back where you were with a bootable hard drive and all your files intact.
Simple backup, such as what you'd get from a cloud service requires that you replace the bad drive, reinstall the OS, set everything back up again and THEN restore files. Depending on what you've backed up to the service this could be a lengthy process.
This is how I do mine. I use SuperDuper to a notebook HD in a little firewire enclosure.
Thank You
Have 10.4.11, an external HD for a bare metal restore seems best for this situation. Where is a quality 120 GB to 150 GB external enclosed HD with a good price found? All that has been seen is much bigger capacity HD. Thank you very much for the help!
This is where you can really save your self a lot of money if you do it yourself.
If you have a local electronics/computer shop you can pick up a cheap SATA drive and a cheap enclosure. Put the SATA drive in the enclosure (probably want to buy one with a Firewire 400 interface), power it up and connect it to the eMac.
No need to buy a commercial ready to go expensive external when you can just buy a bare drive and a case. Unless you're really not comfortable doing that. However, it's really an easy thing to do.
If you don't have a local store or prefer to order online, just do a search for hard drive enclosures and for hard drives.
Your eMac is probably IDE/PATA, but I am suggesting SATA for the bare drive because it's commonly available and since you'd be sticking it in an enclosure it doesn't matter, because your eMac will use Firewire to interface with it.
This is about as simple as you can get.