Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
how do you backup your data with your MBP?
- Thread starter kidwithdimples
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Ah I didn't know that. Do you just choose the most important locations for incremental backups?
No, I backup my entire hard drive, then the incremental backups will back up only what has changed on my drive since the last backup.
I am new to the Mac so I am carrying over what I did with my PC.
1) Time Machine to local USB drive. Will buy Time Capsule later.
2) Mozy.com for data, docs, pics, music. Not system or apps.
This gives me three copies, with one being off site. I have see to many people lose data and I am not eager to join that group. I once had someone bring me their laptop and their USB drive that they used for backup. Both the laptop drive and the USB drive broke the same week. Talk about bad luck. . . . It happens.
1) Time Machine to local USB drive. Will buy Time Capsule later.
2) Mozy.com for data, docs, pics, music. Not system or apps.
This gives me three copies, with one being off site. I have see to many people lose data and I am not eager to join that group. I once had someone bring me their laptop and their USB drive that they used for backup. Both the laptop drive and the USB drive broke the same week. Talk about bad luck. . . . It happens.
I use Time Machine only because its the most hassel free.
Having a backup that I could boot from would be convenient.
Having a backup that I could boot from would be convenient.
I keep tellin you all....it is not OCD....please use CDO.....(the letters must be in alphabetical order if you are true compulsive disorder obsessive!!!!!!!!)
Have you looked closely at CCC for your backup solution? It's really simple and convenient. It doesn't give you the roll back function that Time Machine does (it also doesn't consume disk space like TM), but automatic backups are very simple to set up and you also have a bootable backup.
I agree with this- either CCC or Super Super (my preference) are great. I personally don't need the roll back function- I don't throw away much and rarely need to restore one file. I like the bootable backup option for sure. So if I had to choose one I would do bootable backup with Super Duper.
Just backed up about 200GB on time machine and it took a good 2 hours. My incremental backups fly though.
Does it show how much is being backed up? 30MB vs 1.7GB?4 minutes on my Time Machine
OK, I know that part of the time is hard drive speed and USB/FW400/FW800 throughput, but I'm going to do a new initial backup of 200GB and I'll see how long it takes.
Edit: I just did a 200GB initial backup with CCC and it took just under 10 minutes. In my experience, it's a faster process to do the initial backup, since CCC doesn't need to analyze and compare drive contents with the backup to determine what has changed. That appears to take longer than the actual writing of updated info to the backup drive.
Last edited:
Another newcomer to the Mac here.
I'm using Time machine (on an external 1TB usb drive) for my local backups (with the odd DVD burnt for really critical stuff). However, I also have been trying out Arq for the last few weeks - and it seems really quite good (although I think the user interface probably needs a little work). Having a backup in Amazon S3 seems a sensible "off-site" addition to the local version. 250MB on S3 has so far cost me about $0.06 for the two or three weeks in the first billing period.
However, my time machine backup has already saved my bacon when I needed to restore a VMware VM that had somehow become corrupted: 4 minutes to restore a 8GB image (so far this isn't included in the off-site backup).