Back Up Your Data on a Mac

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Nothing you do with a computer will ever be as important as making a solid backup.

Hard drives fail, it's a fact of life. When yours does, unless you have a backup, you'll find yourself facing expensive data recovery services or worse: lost data.

Ideally, your backup system should be redundant. In other words, create at least two backups on two forms of media. At the very least, you should have a clone of your hard drive handy should your primary system go south.

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What You'll Need

1) A Hard Drive. You should have a secondary hard drive of equal or greater capacity to the hard drive you want to back up.

2) Software. Some back up software from one of the third party vendors listed below. Or, if you're Unix savvy, you can get by with rsync and cron, which are built in to Mac OS X. In this how to, we'll just be looking at easy-to-use GUI solutions.

List of Backup Software

EMC (formerly Dantz) Retrospect (or Retrospect Express): Retrospect is a well-known Mac backup solution. A single-user desktop license is about $95, and it supports just about any type of storage, from high-end tape drives to optical media.

A special edition of Retrospect, named "Retrospect HD," is included with some external hard drives that specifically target the Mac market. Retrospect HD is stripped down a bit from its sibling (it only backs up to a hard drive), but if it's bundled with your drive then you can get by without the full version.

SuperDuper: SuperDuper is a relatively inexpensive piece of software designed to make it easy to clone a drive or back up folders. The full version of Super Duper costs $28, but it also has a free mode.

In the free mode, Super Duper can create complete and/or partial backup clones to a hard disk or disk image image file (.dmg). The full (paid) version allows you to schedule periodic back ups, and also allows for more fine-grained control over which files get backed up.

SuperDuper also features an option named "Sandbox," which protects your boot disk from some types of catastrophic failure by creating a bootable copy of your system. This copy is stored on another hard drive that shares your personal documents and data with the original. This allows you to install system updates or evaluation software in the Sandbox, without worrying about your actual system. If something does go wrong, you simply start up from the original system.

Carbon Copy Cloner: CCC is a very popular, free program that will allow you to either clone your harddisk (useful if you want a bootable external disk in case of HD failure, or if you want to move your system to a new machine/disk without reinstalling everything) or selectively backup folders on a regular basis. Like other products mentioned here, CCC can do incremental backups, saving a lot of time. The interface is minimalist, but it does everything a regular Mac user could ask for.

Time Machine: As part of the standard installation of Mac OS X, Apple is including a back up software system by the name of Time Machine. It offers incremental back up and recovery of files. This is the easiest option for backups if you're running Mac OS X, since it ships for free, pre-installed on the operating system. Time machine can be set to backup every hour, every day, every, week, or any set number of days. If you have a Macbook and use an external USB drive for your time machine backups, it will prompt you to back up, (plug in the external backup drive), at whatever interval you set it for.

ChronoSync: ChronoSync is another synchronization option that allows for drag-and-drop cloning. Just drag the folders you'd like to sync onto the application window, then choose your options. Chronosync offers many options for deciding which files are synced and which ones are ignored.

While ChronoSync is a decent backup option, it also provides a very easy way to keep folders between two Macs in sync. For instance, if you have desktop machine and a laptop that you use when traveling, ChronoSync makes it easy to sync up the laptop to the current state of the desktop whenever you head out of town.

ChronoSync will set you back $30, but you can download a demo copy to see if it fits your needs.

LaCie SilverKeeper: SilverKeeper is a simple but capable backup program which allows you to back up files to any mountable device (CDs, DVDs, hard disks, tape drives, etc.).

Silverkeeper is made by the hard drive manufacturer LaCie and ships with many of its drives. If you're not interested in owning a LaCie drive, Silverkeeper is available as free download from the LaCie website. Silverkeeper can set up schedules, make bootable clones, skip selected files and has a number of other nice customization features.

Internet Backup

You don't need to own a drive to back up your files. The web is always an option. There are a number of online storage services (Dropbox, Box.net and dozens more) that offer space to back up your files. These services let you access your data through the web browser or an FTP client, and some even offer syncing capability for time-based, automated backups.

Most services hover in the 1 gigabyte range, so this obviously isn't a viable solution for an entire drive unless you're willing to pay for more storage space. But it doesn't hurt to have an extra copy of your documents folder somewhere that's accessible from any computer.

Most Mac users have probably heard of Apple's Mobile Me service which offers 20 gigabytes of space for $99 a year. It also offers some other services not related to backing up files, like e-mail, website hosting and a "locate my lost iPhone" service.

Apple's service comes with some pre-designed templates that let you back up key folders, but you can also roll your own template. The Mobile Me back up solution will even run if your machine is asleep at the scheduled time.

Also, check out Jungle Disk - a service that uses Amazon's S3 environment to back everything up. Bold text

This page was last modified 13:56, 10 March 2011 by samjiggs. Based on work by middleofnowhere, happyphil, howto_admin, kent, frankie, amyatwired and mrkendalb and Anonymous user(s) of Wired How-To Wiki.