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what would be the best and cheapest way to back up ?
- Thread starter semin28
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you can go to your local radio shack and pick up an external hard drive for under a hundred bucks. then use time machine and you're done!
Carbonite works pretty well~~house catches fire at least there's a backup offsite..along with your external backup of course
I just installed the free trial and noticed it did not back up my avi files. Is it true these will be backed up with the paid subscription?
Thanks, Anna
Yes with Paid subscription they can be backed up. They take up a lot of space so they don't back them up for the trial.
I use Mozy currently rather than Carbonite. Similar service. I decided that an off site backup was worth the $5-10/month.
Whatever external you get stay away of LaCie brands. They seem to hard bad power supplies.
Just get a self install shell (like this) and get any hard drive you want and install it yourself. This way if the drive fails in the future, you can just get another cheap bare drive and install that without getting another external.
Just get a self install shell (like this) and get any hard drive you want and install it yourself. This way if the drive fails in the future, you can just get another cheap bare drive and install that without getting another external.
Thank you so much for your quick answer and confirmation the AVI's will be backed up. Is there a reason you use Mozy instead of Carbonite?
Anna
Not really a good reason. I started with them a couple years ago and just have not moved. I also like CrashPlan. I think all three work fine.
What do you mean by "back up everything"?
If you want to be able to restore your system completely (programs, settings, etc.) in case of hard drive failure, etc. then none of the online backup solutions are going to do it for you. (Except to make a secondary backup of the image file you are going to have to create...)
If that's what you want, you need to create an "image" of your partition. (Or partitions.) The image will be smaller than your hard drive, because it doesn't include unused space, and can be compressed. You will wind-up with one big file (or possibly several pretty-big files, depending on the software and options.) You can then make additional backup copies of the image file(s). You can later restore the image to an empty partition and you will have an exact clone of the original.
There is built-in imaging software that comes with OSX. But I use SuperDuper!
It's inconvenient to image your partition very often, as it is time-consuming and uses a lot of disk space. So, you probably will want additional "file backup" software, and you would typically omit "system" stuff like programs and (possibly) settings.
For that, I use CrashPlan+. The basic CrashPlan (without the +) is free, and you can backup to a local hard drive, another computer on your network, or a friend's computer (over the Internet) also running CrashPlan. You pick what directories you want to back-up, and they recently added support for multiple backup sets. So, you can backup important files more often, or to more destinations. CrashPlan+ requires a license, and adds some features and cloud storage. It will automatically backup your data files during the day at whatever interval you want and save multiple versions, so if you want to get back that file before you changed it at noon, you can.
If you want to be able to restore your system completely (programs, settings, etc.) in case of hard drive failure, etc. then none of the online backup solutions are going to do it for you. (Except to make a secondary backup of the image file you are going to have to create...)
If that's what you want, you need to create an "image" of your partition. (Or partitions.) The image will be smaller than your hard drive, because it doesn't include unused space, and can be compressed. You will wind-up with one big file (or possibly several pretty-big files, depending on the software and options.) You can then make additional backup copies of the image file(s). You can later restore the image to an empty partition and you will have an exact clone of the original.
There is built-in imaging software that comes with OSX. But I use SuperDuper!
It's inconvenient to image your partition very often, as it is time-consuming and uses a lot of disk space. So, you probably will want additional "file backup" software, and you would typically omit "system" stuff like programs and (possibly) settings.
For that, I use CrashPlan+. The basic CrashPlan (without the +) is free, and you can backup to a local hard drive, another computer on your network, or a friend's computer (over the Internet) also running CrashPlan. You pick what directories you want to back-up, and they recently added support for multiple backup sets. So, you can backup important files more often, or to more destinations. CrashPlan+ requires a license, and adds some features and cloud storage. It will automatically backup your data files during the day at whatever interval you want and save multiple versions, so if you want to get back that file before you changed it at noon, you can.