Back up advice

W

Willo24

Registered
I have realised that the 2500 files I rely on for my study that sit on my PowerBook hard drive are particularly vulnerable to varios disasters especially the computer being stolen. I need a sensible, reliable backup plan.

I have a Linux box at home that runs my IMAP mail server and can store backed up data on that.

Can any one suggest which backup software would allow relatively easy (ie low maintenance) routine backup? Free or inexpensive options would be good. I looked at ChronoSync yesterday - anyone using that?

Seperately, is it useful trying to back up the whole harddrive or should I just try and cherry-pick the data containing directories? Would I be able to restore from backed up data if, for example, the hard drive failed and was replaced in the PowerBook,

thanks for the benefit of your experience,

Will.
 
I've been using ChronoSync for a long time. Simple, easy to use and works well.
 
You may want to have a look at this e-book:

Take Control of Mac OS X Backups ($10) Free sample pages available for download.
http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/backup-macosx.html

For most oridinary users, I would recommend that you purchase a FireWire drive of a capacity that is greater than your primary hard drive, and then use a good cloning utility to create an exact bootable clone of your primary drive. That way, if your primary drive dies, you won't lose any time restoring things, you can just switch to your backup drive. The cloning utility you use should include the abilty to do incremental backups and automatically delete old versions of files and trashed files.

Very popular for this task is:

Carbon Copy Cloner (free, donation requested)
http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html

But many users prefer the ease of use of:

SuperDuper $20
http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html
 
By the way, if you want a list of backup software for OS X, I have a very extensive list. If you want to see it let me know. There are quite a few backup programs for OS X, including several that are free.
 
If you decide to buy an external drive, keep in mind that many drives come prepackaged with backup software. Many of these apps (Retrospect Express, etc.) are fairly usable. So before you buy a separate software package, you should see what comes with the external drive. My feeling is that 80% of the world's backup software is essentially interchangeable for 80% of the user base. So don't lose too much of your life to comparison shopping!

As Randy said, though, a lot of the free utilities are perfectly usable, and you might well find one that's a perfect fit.

If you look into backing up straight to the Linux box, consider rolling your own with rsync. It takes a little more doing, but getting it all to work is very satisfying.
 
I use an external Firewire drive with Retrospect Desktop. I don't use it to clone my primary drive but to make full and incremental backups of that drive. Works well for me. Another option, if you have a CD or DVD-RW drive, is burning your most important files to a writeable CD or DVD.

Like bill said above, if you buy an external drive, see if if comes with backup software and try to learn how to use that software.
 
Thanks for all your advice.

Bill's
If you decide to buy an external drive, keep in mind that many drives come prepackaged with backup software. Many of these apps (Retrospect Express, etc.) are fairly usable.
Click to expand...
was just about right.

I ended up buying a Maxtor firewire drive for simple backups. The included software is Retrospect express and it is soing what I need. I know that solution is essentially cloning and that there are potential problems with that strategy, especially the possibility of overwriting a good backup with corrupter data files. The convenience of a bootable backup was a winner for my though.

Will.
 
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