Backup your Mac!!
(Full Disclosure: This happened to me a couple of weeks ago - What an idiot!)
Okay - a show of hands: How many of you take your family photos with a digital camera? Wow, that’s quite a few. How many of you use iTunes to organize and store your digital music at home? Very impressive.
My question to you is: What if? What if your house burns down? What if your computer is stolen? What if…no. Let me rephrase this: What will you do WHEN your hard drive dies? It will, you know. These are just a few scenarios that stand between having your important files and never seeing them again. These days, we have and hold so much stuff electronically that we may take for granted that we could lose all of this important data as fast as lighting strikes and causes a power surge.
That is why we should take this subject very seriously.
Fortunately, backing up your important data at home is not as complicated as it used to be. Here’s a ’super’ easy backup strategy you should (SHOULD) employ for your mac at home:
Buy a FireWire drive at least as large as your home computers’ hard drive. Download and buy a nifty little app called SuperDuper! ($27.95 - think of it as very cheap insurance). Format the drive using Disk Utility (it’s in the /Applications/Utilities/ folder). Choose your new drive from the disks in the left window. Go to the partition tab and click the ‘options’ button. If you Mac is an Intel, choose the ‘GUID’ option. If you have a PowerPC mac, choose the ‘apple partition table’ option and erase the disk.
Launch SuperDuper!. Choose your Mac’s hard drive on the left side and your new disk on the right side. Hit ‘Copy Now’. This may take a while to run. It’s doing a complete clone of your hard drive. Future backups will be relatively short because SuperDuper! will only copy new files from now on if you use its ‘Smart Copy’ feature. After running SuperDuper! you now have a bootable copy of your Mac on your new drive. So, when something happens to your data, you can plug the FireWire drive into almost any mac and boot from it. After booting up, the monitor will show you your old computer just like nothing happened.
You can plug in your FireWire drive once a week, run SuperDuper!, then unplug and throw the FireWire drive in your car. Uh, why your car? The best place for your backup is somewhere physically separate from the location of your computer. Why keep the backup in your house? it could burn down (I hope it doesn’t). Or it gets stolen from your house or (fill in the blank). You get it.
Another option
There are some new, online storage services such as Mozy, CrashPlan, and JungleDisk. These allow you to backup your data over the Internet. But, as you probably imagine, the initial backup might take a long time, but the incremental backups after that shouldn’t take many resources.
My last piece of advice? Backup, please.
(here a some other resources: Scot Kelby’s blog here and here. A funny and, er, to-the-point tutorial for mac users only!
Update: Hey! Everyones getting into the act! Here’s Terry White’s take.