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Back-up
- Thread starter CocoSS
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Thank you master. I had never thought of that
Sometimes the obvious solution is the best one.
I agree. While there are online services, they won't help if internet access is unavailable. I recommend buying a hard drive and using Carbon Copy Cloner to make a bootable backup of your drive. If your drive ever dies, simply swap the drives and boot up. You can keep the backup current with incremental updates using any frequency you choose to schedule.
You can buy a dropbox account that gives you up to 100 GB of online storage that is automatically synced with your laptop. It's quite expensive, $200/year, so I would recommend to buy an external HD!!!
Note that it is still useful to use dropbox (2 GB free) or another online storage service for important files - if your house burns down or the laptop + external hdd is stolen, you don't loose everything.
What's your budget? How much data? How safe do you want it to be/to what extents are you willing to go? How accessible (how quickly, etc) do you need your data to be? There are tons of options -- many more so if you're looking to layer options for the best protection of your data. Finding an option suited to you means that you need to provide much more info than you have so far.
The quality of responses are directly related to the quality of your question. Backups, like anything else, aren't a one-size-fits-all thing. For example, I use a NAS with XRAID.
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How large is your internal hard drive, how full is it, and what do you use it for?
Do you have lots of music and documents that you'll just need to back up once and then forget about? Or do you work with lots of large files that will require regular large backups?
The most simple solution is to buy an external hard drive as others have suggested. For less than $100 you can buy a drive large enough to back up your current system, but it might be wise to buy a larger drive in order to ensure room for longer term backups.
If you've never used Time Machine before, it's fairly simple. You plug in the hard drive and the system will ask you if you want to use it as a time machine backup drive. The system will begin making an initial back up which will take much longer than you would expect it to. (Little files that wouldn't normally take terribly long to transfer from one drive to another each have to be moved and catalogued individually.) After that, just plug in the external drive as often as you'd like to perform a back up. Backups are performed automattically on a regular basis, or you can tell the system to go ahead and make a backup manually at any given time.
Do you have lots of music and documents that you'll just need to back up once and then forget about? Or do you work with lots of large files that will require regular large backups?
The most simple solution is to buy an external hard drive as others have suggested. For less than $100 you can buy a drive large enough to back up your current system, but it might be wise to buy a larger drive in order to ensure room for longer term backups.
If you've never used Time Machine before, it's fairly simple. You plug in the hard drive and the system will ask you if you want to use it as a time machine backup drive. The system will begin making an initial back up which will take much longer than you would expect it to. (Little files that wouldn't normally take terribly long to transfer from one drive to another each have to be moved and catalogued individually.) After that, just plug in the external drive as often as you'd like to perform a back up. Backups are performed automattically on a regular basis, or you can tell the system to go ahead and make a backup manually at any given time.
I use an external 1tb firewire 800 drive for my time machine backups. As has been obviously stated, get yourself an external drive.