Backing up my new mac...

I'm getting a macbook soon and want to know a safe & good way to backup.... I'd like it to be on a recurring schedule. I don't have an external drive, but can share an internal drive from my PC over my wireless network quite happily (have experience in this) ....but I've heard that it won't keep a persistant connection to it on osx and therefore could bug me.

I've thought about using FTP, because being a standard protocol, it shouldn't matter what OS I use to backup from/to, but how would I get that on a schedule if I were to use it on osx?

Thanks.

 

Mac OS has built in backup software called Time Machine...however,you will need external HDD formatted HFS+,which only macos supports

 

Making this a bit complicated for myself, however...

I don't want to have an external drive connected to my macbook all the time or even when I think time machine wants to do a backup (correct me if I'm wrong on this, don't have it yet) I want something that will work over the air waves that isn't the expensive apple capsule either...

And also.... I doubt that Windows PCs can read the filesystem for the time machine, which is kind of a no no as if my mac breaks.... I still can't access those files, even if they're backed up... unless I have another mac... which i won't have...

 

If you have a lot of data an external drive is probably preferable because it's much faster. You can format it FAT32, which both Mac and Windows can read, but I think limits it to 2GB files sizes.

 

You can format the drive to NTFS, then install a NTFS plugin on your Mac so you can write to NTFS volumes

 

hmmm, will wait until I get it then and see what options I have. At present I use Karen's Replicator which backs up my PC laptop to my pc desktop and it doesn't re-copy things accross, only backs up whats changes, which is usually quite small. May look at the fat32/NTFS route; looks promising.
Thanks.

 

Sadly,TM only recognize HFS+

OP,you can get Time Capsule for quite cheap from ebay(if you are interested(I got my 1tb for 250$))

 

Do what I did.

Pick up an external Free Agent and reformat to HFS+

Backup

Pop in new HD

Restore

Format External back to NTFS

 

That won't work I don't think, as I still wouldn't be able to use my data whithout osx, therefore couldn't continue my projects on the pc if I needed to; things like photoshop, etc.

Think I'll save for the Time Capsule; I must admit, they look good, can it can sit somewhere out of the way from prying eyes too

Thanks for your solutions... Have had a good read on these forums (hope to get a macbook, now macbook pro, next month) some great info here.

 

If your data is in RAW or JPEG or TIFF it will remain as such. You are just accomodating the hard drives to run at their opptomised cache flow.

 

There has to be some plug in out there to let your Windows machines read HFS+ of a Time Machine drive. Even if you go with a time capsule, it wants to work this way. I haven't looked but there has to be software that will allow Windows to read HFS+ since Boot Camp in Snow Leopard says it gives the Windows side the ability to read/write the HFS+ Mac partition.

 

Another option is to use live mesh from Windows Live servies.
You don't have to worry about the drive file system. You can backup through lan/internet and you can store your file on your other computers/on Microsoft's free cloud storage/on your external drives. It'll automatically backup your file or you can choose whenever you want to backup.

Best of all, it's free and you can utilize what you have right now.