Back up options with OS 10.5

[silvrbullet]

I tried searching for these answers, but I couldn't find anything specific enough. I'm really new with Mac's so bare with me. I have an external hard drive that I currently back up all my media files to, from my PC. As you probably know, Windows gets bogged down with "crap" over time, and a fresh install increases the system performance. Becuase of this, I only backed up everything in my "My Documents" folder (a manual click and drag..) and never made an image of the drive. If I had a disk failure, I want a clean install and then to load all my files back manually.

I was told that Mac's dont get bogged down over time like a windows machine does. Is this true? Would I be better off just using time machine to back up the entire drive, and not worry about doing a fresh install? I'm looking for something more automated, because currently I dont do backups as frequently as I should. My PC is dying, and now it looks like the MBP is going to be my primary computer. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

[wrldwzrd89]

Yes - this is true. Mac users generally just set it and forget it, with Time Machine, and few need to reinstall the OS.

 

[robbieduncan]

My personal backup strategy is a Time Capsule backing up all the time and frequent (every 2-3 weeks) bootable clones to a Firewire external drive.

The backups provide different things: the bootable clone would get me running instantly in the case of a drive failure and makes it easy to restore the entire thing if required; the Time Capsule protects against accidental deletion of files etc and could, in a pinch, be used to restore from too.