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Help with backing up ibook G4

T

thespine

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Nov 28, 2007
3
0
I have an ibook G4 with 10.4.9 and I have no back up system other than an old zip drive 100 that I throw a few excel documents on. I run a business from this computer and have a lot of stuff on here, and have a ton of family pictures and it would be horrible to lose them. I don't know much at all about backing up and would really appreciate some advice. What external device would be best? Something affordable and what software? Something free or cheap. Are there any ways to back up my hard drive without buying an external device? Again, I am totally in the dark so you will need to reply like you are talking to an idiot. :) I am a little concerned because I have been running slow lately. Did some maintenance but it only helped a little. I keep reading about ibook hard drives dying. I did purchase this used about 6 months ago and up until now has been great. No problems now other than just running a lot slower. No crashes or nothing weird going on other than some trouble with my wireless connection when I am upstairs away from my modem. Disk is verified and control in utilities doesn't show anything weird. but I really would like to back up my stuff asap. Thanks for any help!
 
First of all, a couple questions would help us figure out the best solution for you.

How big is your hard drive? (How many gb?)

What do you want to backup? (Documents, photos, music, programs? everything? some of it?)

What OS version are you running?

How much money do you have to spend? (IE do you really want to just use your Zip 100 drive? Would you spend up to $100?)
 
thespine said:
I have an ibook G4 with 10.4.9 and I have no back up system other than an old zip drive 100 that I throw a few excel documents on. I run a business from this computer and have a lot of stuff on here, and have a ton of family pictures and it would be horrible to lose them. I don't know much at all about backing up and would really appreciate some advice. What external device would be best? Something affordable and what software? Something free or cheap. Are there any ways to back up my hard drive without buying an external device? Again, I am totally in the dark so you will need to reply like you are talking to an idiot. :) I am a little concerned because I have been running slow lately. Did some maintenance but it only helped a little. I keep reading about ibook hard drives dying. I did purchase this used about 6 months ago and up until now has been great. No problems now other than just running a lot slower. No crashes or nothing weird going on other than some trouble with my wireless connection when I am upstairs away from my modem. Disk is verified and control in utilities doesn't show anything weird. but I really would like to back up my stuff asap. Thanks for any help!
Click to expand...

1. I do not know how big your HD is now, but maybe you have too much stuff on your HD and that is slowing it down.
2. Look into iomega for extrnal HDs, got an email from them for a 300+ HD for $99.00.
3. All you need to do is drag and drop your files onto any HD for backup, or search versiontracker.com for free software.
 
30 gb hard drive, 10.4.9 os, 512 ram, and I would hope to not go over $150. I want to back up the entire hard drive which contains photos, lots of photos, graphics, spreadsheets, word docs, that sort of thing. Not really any music. Nothing out of the ordinary. I am using about 14 gb of space last time I looked. I am getting more and more concerned, as my computer just isn't running as fast as it used too. Should I be concerned that my hard drive is dying or is there some other maintenance that I am not thinking of that I can do? Thanks for replying and hoping to hear back from someone with some advice.
 
Since you have no backup system in place, I'd do it properly.

Buy a seagate external. Here's a 500GB Amazon link. You can probably find cheaper 500GB hard drives, but none come with a 5 year warranty, which is worth it, in my opinion.

500GB may sound like total overkill right now, but that should give you plenty of space for the foreseeable future / future computer upgrades. Limiting yourself now doesn't make sense, hard drives are cheap.

Next, buy SuperDuper!.

The rest is self explanatory. These are the only tools that I would personally use for a backup solution. Anything less and I wouldn't feel comfortable with the integrity of my backup.
 
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