feyd_ehway said:
what is your recomendation for best way to back up files?
on dvd i suppose, but do you compress?(with what to what?)
how do you organize all of it?(duplicates and all)
-feyd
There's no single answer to this. Everybody will have a slightly different approach so just find something that works for you. I think a good place to start is by organizing your data in some kind of orderly fashion and weeding out duplicate files, junk, etc as you go. How often you back up will depend on how much data you have and how screwed you'd be if it all went away suddenly. The format you back up to depends on what you've got available--though if your data is important enough you'll buy whatever you need to get the job done.
Here's what I do: My main computer is a G4 MDD. The OS and applications live on 1 hard drive, my home folder lives on another drive, and I have a 3rd drive for editing movies and other large projects. Once a week (usually Saturday morning) I drag my entire home folder to an external hard drive. Every couple months I burn my Documents folder to DVD and stash it at my mom's house. Lastly I use Backup to automatically save my bookmarks, keychain, calanders, address book, Quicken data, and other small but frequently changing and vital files to iDisk every night.
I have an iBook that I take to work. The contents tend not to change that much, but when they do I just sync the iBook to the G4 and stuff gets backed up off the G4 (and a copy stays on the iBook so there are in effect 3 copies of my work files).
We've got a G4 Cube that mostly gets used to hold music and stream it to the other computers/devices in the house. I recently went through the iTunes library and removed duplicates and did some other trickery to get the size down from 60GB to about 45GB. The whole library gets backed up to an external drive once a month unless I've been buying a lot of music in which case I'll back it up after my binge is over. Periodically I burn my ITMS purchased music to DVD and I make 2 copies. One goes into my closet with all my CDs and the other goes to my mom's house. In the event that the music on the Cube and my backup drive is lost I can re-encode from the original CDs and my DVD backup of ITMS stuff.
At work I manage 2 iMac DVs and a PowerMac 5400. I keep images of the drives so when one gets hosed (though the only 1 that has had problems so far is the 5400) I can restore the computers quickly.
I've never had a serious loss of data. A couple months ago the Cube wouldn't boot. I had to reinstall Jaguar on my G4 after the first 10.2.8 was released (anybody remember that first disasterous release?) and my iBook had the logic board and hard drive replaced last year. None of these were major problems in terms of losing data. I just had to spend a little time reinstalling software and restoring files from backup.
By the way, I've used Apple's Backup and Retrospect and wasn't impressed by either. They do incrimental backups, which is nice and they can do them automatically which is great (when it works) but I've found that simply dragging and dropping folders is a lot faster. It also gives you the added benefit of being able to access your backed up data directly. You don't need Retrospect, for instance, to open your backup file. Drag & drop is also free.
That was a much more verbose explanation than I expected to give. Thank you insomnia!