Help with backing up

[geekygoddess]

I must admit, I'm not someone who normally backs up.😱 But I am trying to change my evil ways. Can anyone recommend a good external back up for someone who knows absolutely nothing about backing up. Thanks.

 

[richard.mac]

do you already have an external drive? if not i recommend an OWC Mercury Elite Pro or a Western Digital MyBook. make sure it bigger than your main hard drive. double the size of your hard drive or more is recommended for Time Machine.

youve got a few choices. you can just do a manual backup where you just drag and drop documents, music, videos etc to the external or drag and drop your whole home folder to backup your preferences and application settings as well as your files.

you can clone your whole hard drive to your external using Carbon Copy Cloner (free) or SuperDuper! (licensed)

or if you have Leopard you can use Time Machine which pretty much clones you hard drive to your external but skips useless files like caches. you can also exclude files or folders from a Time Machine backup if you want. make sure your external is empty when you start a Time Machine backup as it formats it to HFS+.

 

[wesrk]

I was wondering this same thing, I've never used Time Machine before and those were some of the same questions I had. Thanks a lot.

 

[comptr]

how about getting a TC ??

 

[geekygoddess]

Thanks everyone for your help. I am going to start backing up as soon as possible🙂