Backup guide to OS X (what is your best advice and app)?
This week I have wondered how other people perform their backups. Besides the obvious advice (do backup and do it often) what advice and application do you recomend to excecute a proper backup?
Also, what devices (drives, tapes etc) do you use for this purpose?
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Octo 2.66 Nehalem 16 Gb RAM, MacBook Pro 4Gb, PowerMac G5, 6Gb RAM, 8Tb storage iPhone 3G, iPod http://www.ramsesmoya.com
This week I have wondered how other people perform their backups. Besides the obvious advice (do backup and do it often) what advice and application do you recomend to excecute a proper backup?
Also, what devices (drives, tapes etc) do you use for this purpose?
But many of us like Super Duper which allows you to clone the whole drive and do subsequent sequential backups I personally use a 160 gig Maxtor on firewire and rotate thru three different partitions on a daily basis. It takes about 10 minutes to verify permissions and do the changed files. It then reboots into the backed up partition so you can see that it actually works. I then change the boot drive via Start Up Disk so I am back in the MacIntosh internal drive.
Daily backup is an overkill for a retired hobbyist user but none the less a good habit Super Duper is about 20 dollars US and has the BEST support I have ever seen on any program. Email questions are often answered in less time that it takes to get connected to a phone tech person. A prudent business person would probably do a backup to CD or DVD for off site storage
Totally agree with Brian Scully ( I was going to use the initials B.S. 'cause it's Sunday and I am lazy, but it seemed a tad insensitive..).
Anyway, SuperDuper is incredibly easy to use. I use it on 2 PBs, 1 eMac and 2 PM G5s at work, all to external drives.
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A MacPro 2.66 Xeon, an iMac G5, a Uni MB, a wee PowerBook 12" 1.5, an eMac, a couple of cameras, a lens collection and a wonderful iPod. Oh, and a delicious wife.
"Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little." Tom Stoppard
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I have recently started to use SuperDuper also and like the application.
All you need is the program and a Back-up Hard Drive.
(A sumular program to CarbonCopyCloner but CCC is not yet supported in Tiger, thus SuperDuper has won the race.)
You can do a backup with the shareware application. Right NOW!
I just started on that this week end, and was looking for various solutions. Although super duper seems great and simple, I need to do a backup of only some folders on various drives (music, my home folder, my images).
I found iBackup, which is free and allows doing this kind of fine selection, plus things like system preferences... It also allows the scheduling of a backup, I haven't checked yet about incremental backup or rotating backup.
I purchased a 200Gb HD which I installed into an external Firewire enclosure for these backups.
I just got the latest version of Retrospect Desktop 6.0x. I am backing up three CPUs over my network (eventually scripting overnight incremental back-ups) onto a 500Gb FW800 drive.
I'll probably use SuperDuper to copy to a 2.5" firewire that I'll keep off-site.
I'm a hobbyist that farts around with my macs.
__________________ Gary
iMac Quad i7 27 MacBook Pro 17 BlackBook Core Duo PMG5 Dual 2.5 G5 iMac 20 iPhone 4 iPod Touch 3 60Gb iPod photo 3G 4Gb Nano 2G 20Gb iPod 5x G3 iMacs PM6100/60 (why am I keeping this?)
Original Apple eWorld member Apple user since 1982 Yorkdale t-shirt #3! Eaton Centre #7 Sherway Gardens #5 Pacific Centre Fairview #5 Got any OS9 educational/kids' software?
word of advice with retrospect backups. Do full restores to test, and do them often. You don't even want to know how much data I've lost to retrospect over the years
word of advice with retrospect backups. Do full restores to test, and do them often. You don't even want to know how much data I've lost to retrospect over the years
This is a good sound advice for all backup systems as well... backing up and restoring are not the same thing. I have seen millions of dollars worth of backup data that did not restore due to different issues.
So I guess every one is using an external, firewire drive. No network/tape or DVD users out there? interesting.
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Octo 2.66 Nehalem 16 Gb RAM, MacBook Pro 4Gb, PowerMac G5, 6Gb RAM, 8Tb storage iPhone 3G, iPod http://www.ramsesmoya.com