how to do a backup

K my Seagate Freeagent Pro, which I bought but left back in Toronto by accident, finally arrived. After the little incident that I had over the weekend and deleted all my music, I am now a pro data-backup guy. So let's do it, yaaaaaaaaaaay....

But wait, how do you backup your data? I mean, when people say I'm going to backup my music files and pictures, does that mean they just copy-paste the files? Or are they referring to something more complicated?

Basically, all I need to backup are around 15gb of music, 15gb of pictures, and 15gb of videos. Do I simply drag and drop? Or should I use another program to "backup"?

 

Backing up is basically, having a copy should the worse happen (your hard drive fails).

You can do a full backup with applications like Super Duper! and Time Machine, but backing up is also as simple as copying your important files (music, photos, videos, documents, whatever) somewhere else, so even if you lose the original copy you're okay.

So there's no right or wrong way to back up. You can do a full backup, or just have a copy of your important files. Doesn't matter, as long as you have what you need should anything happen .

 

If you want to backup up your music, simply copy the music folder to your external hard drive. With a program like super duper, you can do incremental backups, which is cool, but it costs money. I'd just stick to manual backups for now until you get Leopard and use time machine. As for pictures, if you use iPhoto 08, just copy the library file which should be inside your pictures folder and should also be several GB in size if you have a sizable collection.

 

Well, if you just want to backup once, might as well just drag and drop. In the time it takes you to look up the website for Super Duper! and download it, customize it, and etc. you'd be done already.

But if you're planning on doing this on a regular basis and want it more fully automated invest in a program like Super Duper!

The worst thing about backing up isn't that it's a chore - but that it's just hard to remember to do it on a consistent basis.

How do I backup my data? I'm going be really obnoxious and say I clicked this:



clicked on "on" and then the name of my external drive.

that's it.

 

Yea its fine to just backup your music and such, but if something does happen and you've lost other things/install gets messed up, then you might be stuck with just your music ;p

Superduper works pretty well, but its just there for me until I get leopard.

 

Is that Time Machine? I hate you

 

Yes, that is the icon for Time Machine . And taelrak loves you too!

 

NO he hates me. Next thing, he's going to make a BLING chain out of that TIme Machine icon, and come knocking on my door...