Mac backup

[migrantwing]

It's not cheap, but it's not super expensive either. It's a worthy investment. Try a Western Digital external drive or, better still, a standard WD hard drive and an external hard drive enclosure or docking station (see a few examples below). This will work out cheaper in the long run, unless you get a good deal on an external drive. There are backup utilities on the internet for free, and ones that you pay for. I'm not a fan of Mac, but I know that Time Machine is a pain in the a**

The cheapest option is to save all important stuff to a USB drive (£5 upwards, depending on memory size) and from there the stuff can be burned to CD/DVD

WD Caviar Green 500 GB hard drive

Hard Drive enclosure

Docking station

 

[gavintc]

Having used both the software that came with a WD Network Attached Software and the Time Machine. The Time Machine is so easy to use. I had not appreciated it was an hourly upload so will have a look at Time Machine Editor.

 

[Rancid]

Time machine performs its task very well indeed.
Just plug in an external drive and let time machine do its thing.

An additional bonus is that if the HD in the unit was to fail.
You can install a new HD then boot up off the OSX disk and point it towards the USB drive with your time machine backup and it will restore the whole thing apps and all.

very nice app indeed.

 

[ColinJ]

Time machine performs its task very well indeed.
Just plug in an external drive and let time machine do its thing.

An additional bonus is that if the HD in the unit was to fail.
You can install a new HD then boot up off the OSX disk and point it towards the USB drive with your time machine backup and it will restore the whole thing apps and all.

very nice app indeed.

Does it compress the backups? A lot of the stuff on my nephew's Mac will be photos, videos and music which won't compress much. I don't know how big his hard drive is, but it is obviously impossible to backup everything from the HDD if the backup drive is smaller than that and what's on it can't be compressed enough.

I'd better find out how big his HDD is and see if I can afford a USB drive to match.

 

[wiggydiggy]

I know from witnessing the traumas of errant colleagues how important work backups are. One of my friends lost a hard drive which contained all the work he'd done in one year, and of which he had no backup copies, not even any printouts of it. The company had paid him £20k to do that work, so you can bet that they valued it at £50k-100k!

He looked physically sick when he went to tell the departmental manager! I think they had to send the drive to be rebuilt in a data recovery specialist's clean room, at enormous expense.

My nephew would be very upset to lose his music collection, photos and video clips but we are not talking 'mission-critical' data here. I think the USB backup drive should give him most of the protection he needs, and I'll also suggest that he should burn his favourite stuff onto DVDs.

When I was at university I didn't understand the logic behind cut/paste 100% So I Cut the file containing my final project work, deleted the original, then tried to Paste it into a new location Luckily it was recoverable!

 

[Profpointy]

I know from witnessing the traumas of errant colleagues how important work backups are. One of my friends lost a hard drive which contained all the work he'd done in one year, and of which he had no backup copies, not even any printouts of it. The company had paid him £20k to do that work, so you can bet that they valued it at £50k-100k!

He looked physically sick when he went to tell the departmental manager! I think they had to send the drive to be rebuilt in a data recovery specialist's clean room, at enormous expense.

My nephew would be very upset to lose his music collection, photos and video clips but we are not talking 'mission-critical' data here. I think the USB backup drive should give him most of the protection he needs, and I'll also suggest that he should burn his favourite stuff onto DVDs.

I worked for a company where we were doing our work on PCs. The team instigated some kind of backups and even then I knew enough to insist they had a two backup system which you cycle around. If you only have the one backup and the original disc fails half way through a copy, you are up shoot creek as you've just half overwritten your backup! I was told I was being a bit paranoid but they did it my way. A few weeks later another team lost a lot of their work because this exact scenario happened. My own team was very glad they'd listened to me.

There was a bit of a corollary as the company sent the disc off to a "data recovery company" in the hope they could retrieve some of the data. Unfortunately there was a major misunderstanding as they returned the disc "We've replaced the platter and it's working perfectly now". They got upset when we refused to pay !