Looking for an application to do backups of iPhoto library to external drive.

[bobbywillmes]

Ive been building up quite the iPhoto library, about 12,000 photos; and it will be growing much more as I just got a new camera. I always have the scary thought of losing photos, I need to start backing up my photos.
I am looking for an application that will be able to do a backup of my photos to my external hard drive (160GB).
My iPhoto library is currently just under 38GB. I would like to be able to plug in my external drive to my macbook about once a month and run some kind of application to backup my whole iPhoto library to the external...
Oh and I would really like it to be a GUI, I don't really like working in terminal.
Does anything like this exist?

 

[spinnerlys]

If you have Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) or newer you can use Time Machine and exclude all the other files you don't want to backup.

There is also Carbon Copy Cloner. http://www.bombich.com/

 

[roliath]

time machine will do what you need, you'll have to manually exclude everything though. or i think you can tell it to just back your personal directory.
its automatic and runs in the background as long as the usb drive is connected.

 

[Tumbleweed666]

Another vote for Time Machine, and why the heck would you only do it once a month? Would you really be happy to lose a months worth of photos?

 

[mysterytramp]

For a one-off backup like this, Time Machine might not be the better answer. TM only has one backup setting, correct? So s/he'd have to eliminate it for all other backups. That might not be optimal.

You might want to consider something like SyncTwoFolders or BackupList. Both are free.

mt

 

[miles01110]

Use CCC. It'd be a huge pain to exclude everything but the library from TM.

 

[jontucker]

Errrr, what's wrong with Finder? If you're only going to backup your iPhoto library file, you can do it in about 5 clicks.

 

[miles01110]

Errrr, what's wrong with Finder? If you're only going to backup your iPhoto library file, you can do it in about 5 clicks.

Because CCC (or TM, or SuperDuper) can save loads of time by doing incremental backups after the initial backup.

 

[maflynn]

For offiste backups (using a portable HD) I use CCC, I found it a much better tool then Time Machine. I still use Time Machine but only for those times I deleted (or altered) a file I wished I hadn't.

For those times I truly mess up the system, I use CCC for the restore because the restore process is much faster then TM. I did a TM restores once, and it took in excess of 8 hours, where as CCC only took 2 hours.

 

[jontucker]

Because CCC (or TM, or SuperDuper) can save loads of time by doing incremental backups after the initial backup.

We're talking about quite a small amount of data by todays standards. 40Gb would take just over 10 mins on USB2, there isn't that much time to save!