Back-up applications and Hard Drive

[WhySoSerious]

I need some guidance from you seasoned vets.

I just got a MBP and want to purchase an external HD to back up EVERYTHING.

How do I do this?

Yeah, I know it's a broad question, but some things I need advice on are:

- what size of external should i get and what brand? (MBP is 250GB)
- what program should i install on the MBP to do the back-up?
- to do back-ups...do i just connect the external to the MBP and click "back-up"?

Thanks for helping a noob....and any other info you want to offer up to assist is GREEEEEAAAATLY apprecaited!

Merry Xmas!

 

[skyrider007]

Get a FireWire 800 external hard drive and use Time Machine for automatic backup. I'd suggest 500GB or higher for capacity and 7,200RPM.

 

[WhySoSerious]

Get a FireWire 800 external hard drive and use Time Machine for automatic backup. I'd suggest 500GB or higher for capacity and 7,200RPM.

what app would you suggest i use if i don't have Leopard?

 

[skyrider007]

what app would you suggest i use if i don't have Leopard?

If your hard drive is from LaCie or Western Digital, it should come bundled with a back-up app.

 

[jsgreen]

I just went through a process of figuring out a backup plan for myself...

I bought a 750Gb external HDD from OWC, Firewire 800, 400, USB and eSATA interfaces (although I'll just use the FW800). It was about $300.

I partitioned it into several partions..my backups will be Time Machine (to one partition) and SuperDuper (to another partition).

I decided to use TM + SD because you can't boot to a TM backup, just restore. That's fine for "whoops I deleted that by accident" issues, but not if your HD actually fails. SuperDuper creates a bootable clone of your drive (so you can really only go back in time to the last backup), but if you pay $28 to register you can schedule these, and run incremental backups (only backs up what has changed...so shorter run times).

note - SuperDuper isn't fully released for Leopard yet, but the (well respected) developer is working on it.

 

[WhySoSerious]

I just went through a process of figuring out a backup plan for myself...

I bought a 750Gb external HDD from OWC, Firewire 800, 400, USB and eSATA interfaces (although I'll just use the FW800). It was about $300.

I partitioned it into several partions..my backups will be Time Machine (to one partition) and SuperDuper (to another partition).

I decided to use TM + SD because you can't boot to a TM backup, just restore. That's fine for "whoops I deleted that by accident" issues, but not if your HD actually fails. SuperDuper creates a bootable clone of your drive (so you can really only go back in time to the last backup), but if you pay $28 to register you can schedule these, and run incremental backups (only backs up what has changed...so shorter run times).

note - SuperDuper isn't fully released for Leopard yet, but the (well respected) developer is working on it.

from the sounds of it, superduper will work wonders for me since i don't have Leopard yet. with superduper, you mentioned it has a "cloned-bootable" drive, but can i just go into the drive and extract single/individual files at will (say i deleted a word doc)?

 

[jsgreen]

... but can i just go into the drive and extract single/individual files at will (say i deleted a word doc)?

SD Users Manual is also available for dl: http://homepage.mac.com/dnanian/SuperDuper/SuperDuper.pdf

I should RTFM:

Restoring files from a backup
Recovering a single file – or a few files – is quite easy. Just attach the external drive or mount the backup image, and drag the file back to the proper location using the Finder.

That’s all there is to it!