Backup advice

[Howard Brazee]

We never got around to having a backup strategy on my wife's iMac. She got it January, and never bought any backup programs, nor bought an external disk drive. I do have a USB DVD writer.

Any suggestions for a backkup strategy? (maybe the best thing is to figure out what size disk drive to buy and wait for Leopard)

 

[NickD]

I may recommend purchasing a 200-300GB External HD and downloading the free program, Carbon Copy Cloner, which will create a bootable disk image of your system.

NickD

 

[eyebeaz]

I agree, buying an external is a good idea, and another program for backing up is SuperDuper! although you have to pay to use certain feature such as an update feature.

 

[Howard Brazee]

My wife had an appointment at the Apple Store (from the $100 annual thingy which she bought with her computer). The Lady there suggested that she buy .MAC for the year, so we did it. She doesn't want another e-mail address, and she doesn't want to do web pages, but it will be an automatic backup and a place to put family photos to be shared.

 

[netdog]

My wife had an appointment at the Apple Store (from the $100 annual thingy which she bought with her computer). The Lady there suggested that she buy .MAC for the year, so we did it. She doesn't want another e-mail address, and she doesn't want to do web pages, but it will be an automatic backup and a place to put family photos to be shared.

What a surprise that she should recommend an Apple product!

That said, I am a .Mac user who finds the service great for a number of reasons, but the backup space at .Mac is very limited. There are a number of free spaces that give you twice as much or more, but I still wouldn't find even 2GB anywhere near large enough to do my backups.

Another vote for an external drive unless you want to pay $4.95 per month to let somebody else back you up (unlimited) and store everything online for you. Actually, maybe that isn't such a bad deal now that I think about it.

 

[epochblue]

Here's my backup strategy:

I own a 250GB LaCie external drive. I also own the program SmartBackup. On Sundays at 3pm, SmartBackup runs (via an iCal event) and I effectively backup my home folder.

Beyond that, I don't do much. If I was REALLY hardcore, I'd buy another external drive, and do a monthly backup that I keep offsite (at my desk at work, perhaps). For that kind of backup, it might make more sense to clone the drive. You know, just in case.

But I highly recommend the LaCie drive, and I highly recommend SmartBackup. Both have been excellent for me.

 

[jng]

My wife had an appointment at the Apple Store (from the $100 annual thingy which she bought with her computer). The Lady there suggested that she buy .MAC for the year, so we did it. She doesn't want another e-mail address, and she doesn't want to do web pages, but it will be an automatic backup and a place to put family photos to be shared.

Yes there are criticisms of .mac because of price and lacking featuresets. But there are also positives.

.Mac is a start, but by no means an ample solution. I use .Mac to backup critical files that I work on regularly, which usually means by Uni folder, especially my senior thesis. You can backup the rest, photos, iTunes, etc monthly or bimonthly with an external drive.

The DVD writer can also be handy. I find that burning some photo albums to DVDs is useful. My iPhoto runs slow when it hits more than 5000 photos. Not really slow on my new computer. BUt still, there are some photos that are 3 years old and I don't need anymore. So I just put them on CDs and freeup valuable HD space.