Is your computer backed up? With 2T hard disks at around $100, there’s no excuse not to have your computer backed up. At the very least, you should have an external USB Hard Disk with some kind of backup on it. If you haven’t – do it now! This is the easiest way.
As for me – it’s the start of the New Year so I’ve re-evaluated my backup regime. I think it’s working well. Here’s what it is: Continue reading »
There are two main ways to backup your Apple computer.
1. Use Time Machine to automatically backup. This is the Apple way – the easy way.
OR
2. Manually backup your computer with some other software such as Super Duper or Carbon Copy Cloner.
Apple’s way (Time Machine) is a lot simpler. The big disadvantage is that the backup is not bootable. If your computer crashes you need to insert the original DVD and restore from at the Time Machine backup. This can take hours.
The second method takes a few steps longer to set up, but your backup will be bootable. That means if you plug your backup drive in hold down Option-Command-Shift-Delete during startup you can boot straight off your backup drive. In an emergency you can plug in your backup and be running from it under a minute. You can’t do this with Time Machine.
This article describes how to manually backing up using Super Duper. Carbon Copy Cloner and Super Duper are both paid apps. Super Duper has a free version which will do the job.
This article describes how to backup your computer using Time Machine. Apple’s Time Machine is simply the best backup system available for the Macintosh – it’s simple to use and it does everything automatically so you don’t have to remember to back things up. You can use it to go back in time a day, a week, or month to find a file that you’ve deleted or changed, and you can use it to restore your entire system should your Hard Disk go down.
And did I mention how simple it is! Time Machine is built into OS X so all you need to do is Plug in an external hard drive, open Time Machine and select your hard drive, and turn Time Machine on! It will automatically backup for you. Here are those steps is a little bit more detail with some pictures to make it real easy, along with some tips on choosing the size of Hard Drive to buy.
In this previous article I describe how to backup your computer using Apple’s Time Machine and an external hard drive. Here’s how to do it using a network hard drive:
Step 1. Throw out your My Book Live.
Step 2. Go and buy an Apple Time Capsule
Step 3. Turn on Time-Machine.
I kid you not! I am sorry if anyone followed these instructions below. The My Book Live has been more trouble than it’s worth.
1. The drive stopped working in under 1 year.
2. After many calls to Western Digital they still havn’t provided a warranty replacement.
3. They use some weird custom drive format that can’t be read by OSX or Ubuntu or Windows, so you cna’t get the data off your backup if it crashes.
I’ll leave this article below for your information, but DON’T TO IT!!!
It’s worth paying more and using Apple’s time capsule for peace of mind and better support should something go wrong, plus it’s easier to set up.
Someone asked me: “do you have any advice on how to copy a DVD onto another DVD.”
It’s quite easy.
You use apple’s built in disk utility (in your utilities folder) to make a disk image of the dvd (select the DVD then select ‘new image’), it copies it exactly. The default options of compressed and none are fine.
You then use disk utility to burn the disk image you have just created back to a dvd. Select the image and choose ‘burn.’
It must be your own dvd, not a commercial one to to this.
This works with data DVD’s as well as movie DVD’s.
Wayne
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