Help backing up macbook

[rradovitch]

Hello. I have a macbook that does not have time machine. I am looking to back it up to a Lacie external hard drive. O am mainly concerned with my pictures that are in two different programs(iphoto and canon digital photo) my itunes library and my documents from word and excel. What is the easiest way for me to copy this?

I tried just copying the hard drive but it gave me an error.

Please help.

 

[NewMacbookPlz]

Download and run either CarbonCopy or SuperDuper

See which one you prefer and whatnot, but either should do the trick. I'm pretty sure they'll both work fine in freebie mode, even though they have a paid version.

 

[rradovitch]

Thanks for the help. Is there any way to just drag and drop? If so, what do I need to drag or am I better off downloading something like carbon copy?

 

[NewMacbookPlz]

Thanks for the help. Is there any way to just drag and drop? If so, what do I need to drag or am I better off downloading something like carbon copy?

Seeing how you said you want to back up your pictures, your music, and your documents...

....how about dragging THOSE files to the LaCie drive then? I mean, it's just a file transfer, pretty straight forward then...

Alternatively, you can create a disk image of your current drive using Disk Utility (Applications-->Utilities-->Disk Utility) by selecting your drive under the HD sidebar (For me, it's "Macintosh HD" under the "Toshiba 160GB" entry) and click "New Image" at the top. Select your LaCie drive as the destination for this image. I believe you can then just mount the image with Disk Utility at a later time, not too sure with that though, as I've never tried.