Mac backup

There are a million ways to back stuff up, but only one really simple and comprehensive one: the bootable clone. A clone of your system is a mirror image of your hard drive that contains everything, and can be used to boot up your computer if and when your primary hard drive fails.

Having an updated bootable clone ensures that when trouble strikes, you'll have everything you need and will not need to worry about whether or not a certain file or application was backed up, or how to restore the backup. Just boot the clone, and you're up and running. When you get your crashed drive fixed (or replaced), just clone the backup back to your new drive, and you're golden.

The one problem with clones is that they require a lot of storage space, and they typically take a lot of time to make, since you've got to literally copy every single file from your primary drive to the clone.

Get a FireWire hard drive that's at least as large as your primary drive, and use that as your clone. FireWire drives are relatively cheap and are the only practical option for storing large amounts of data on an external bootable devices (don't use a USB connection- Macs can't boot from USB devices).

For software, I now recommend Shirt Pocket's Super Duper!. It allows you to make bootable clones for free, and the $27.95 registration fee enables the Smart Update feature- which eliminates the "lot of time to make" drawback, since it quickly scans your primary drive and then only updates the cloned drive as needed to bring the two into sync. My initial clone with Super Duper! took about an hour. Subsequent Smart Updates take about 15 minutes.

Over the years, I've used other backup programs (such as Silverkeeper and Carbon Copy Cloner- both freeware), but Super Duper! is the slickest I've seen, and it reliably creates full bootable clones of Mac OS X 10.4, which some of the other programs were unable to do.

I highly recommend it.