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.  So if your computer crashes you need to insert the original DVD and restore from at the old 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 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. When I wrote this article originally I used Super Duper, but I use CCC now. I like it better. No reason why.

To make a bootable backup you need to:

1. Buy an external hard drive
2. Format the hard drive
3. Download some backup software
4. Backup your Hard Drive
5. Run the backup software often

Now let me explain those steps in more detail.

1. Buy an external hard drive

You need an external hard drive at least as big as the hard drive on the computer you are intending to back up. Eg if you have an 200G hard drive on your imac, you should get at least an 200G for your backups. This way you will always fit your backup on the external drive.

2. Format the hard drive

Plug in your new hard drive. Run Disk Utility (in your Applications/Utilities folder). Select your new Hard Drive in the left pane.

Before you format it, check in the bottom right of the window that it says “Partition Map Scheme : GUID Partition Table”. If it doesn’t go to the partition tab, choose ’1 Partition’ choose ‘options’, and make sure it is set to ‘GUID Partition Table’ then ‘Apply’.

Now in the Erase tab check it says ‘Mac OS Extended (Journaled)’ as below, type in the name you would like to call it e.g. “Backup” and press Erase. It will now erase and format your external Hard Drive ready for use and call it Backup.

3. Download some backup software
Go to http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html and download the latest version of SuperSooper. It’s free to be able to do a basic backup, or you can pay if you want extra features such as incremental backup (it’s faster, but the end result is the same).

4. Backup your Hard Drive

Run SuperDuper.

Select your Macintosh HD in the left menu, select your new firewire drive in the right one, select ‘backup – all files’. Press copy now, go and have a cup of coffee while you wait for it to copy all your files, perhaps up to an hour or so.

It’s good to select ‘Repair permissions before copying in the options tab, see below. This makes sure your OS X is functioning well before you back it up, otherwise there can be some problems.

5. Run the backup software often
The most important thing about backing up is to do it regularly. It’s also a good idea to do a backup before you install any new system software in case something goes wrong in the installation so you can go back to what it was when you backed up.

How do I use the backup in an emergency?

• Plug in your external drive. Go to System Preferences, select ‘Startup Disk’, select your external Backup, press Restart.

OR

• Plug in your Hard disk and Press Option-Command-Shift-Delete during startup. This will bypass the primary startup volume and seek a different startup volume such as the external one.

You are now running from your backup.

You can now run Disk Utility and erase your main Macintosh HD, then run Superdooper and backup from your Backup to Macintosh HD. When the backup is finished, select Machintosh HD, and restart. You will now be running from your main computer again.

You might want to print these instructions out, so they are handy in an emergency. It’s no use having the instructions on how to boot in an emergency on your computer – you won’t be able to read them. Don’t laugh, I’ve done it!

Here’s an article on how to use time-machine.

Switching to OS X from a PC is a big change. Here are a some of my random thoughts on the transition.

Mentally it’s better to think, “This is new, let’s learn it from scratch” rather than thinking of “changing” from PC to Mac.

There will be lots of times where you will think “How can I do this?”, but you can’t.

Try to resist the disappointment of lack of features, and enjoy the simplicity and integration OS X offers. Try to appreciate less is more.

Forget about Microsoft Office – don’t even install it on your Mac to begin with. Instead, buy iWork and try out Pages and Keynote.

Don’t be tempted to stay with Office because you are used to it. Don’t go back to it after a day of trying out iWork. Use Pages until you are comfortable with it. Use it until you have mastered its text editing, graphics, styles, exporting, text wrap, lists, shadow, charts. Use it till you appreciate the difference between Page Layout and Word Processing. (Think about how much time you’ve spent getting used to Microsoft Word – give Pages a chance) THEN, after you understand Pages, make the decision whether to go back to Microsoft Office or stay in Pages.

Despite the similarities between OSX and XP/ME etc, they are quite different.

I even took while a while to get used to iWork from Word and I am a Mac user.

Avoid the temptation that computer people have to put things in your own directories. OS X likes you to leave things where it puts them.

Eg if you put all your photos in iphoto, they will be available to iwork, idvd, imovie etc. If you decide to put your photos in your own spot, they won’t. OS X very integrated, but it likes you to put photos in iPhoto, music iTunes folder, addresses in address book, calendar in ical, movies into iMovie and so on. It’s best to just jump in boots and all and do it the OS X way.

Don’t be tempted to use Microsoft Office for email for 6 months because it’s easier – you lose the simplicity of the OS X integration if you do this.

Certainly don’t do things like partition a part of hard drive for all your data. The Mac way is to have everything on the boot drive – the way it comes from the shop. If you must, use an external drive for movie files.

Basically don’t fight against OSX, run with it.

Enjoy what it can do, try not to be frustrated by what it can’t do.

If there is a feature you want, email Apple about it and let them know.

Here are some more tips from Apple.

There was a knock on the door at 10 past 8 this morning – it was the Snow Leopard delivery man. I live in Dubbo, NSW, 6 hours drive from Sydney. Snow Leopard arrived on my doorstep at 10 past 8! I can’t believe Apple’s efficiency!

Install was a breeze, took 45 minutes. I did the default install which installed it over my existing system – 10.5.8.

Computer restarted and I was greeted with the Welcome to Macintosh screen.

Everything seemed quite similar, except one of my two monitors was brighter – the gamma settings must have changed.

Some observations:

When I launched Photoshop CS I was presented with a dialog box saying I needed to install rosetta:

Rosetta is a program that allows the new Snow Leopard on an Intel Macintosh to run old programs. I installed it and and my old Photoshop CS works. So does my old copy of Microsoft Office 2004. Happy about that.

When I first opened mail it asked if I wanted to update/import my existing mail accounts. My heart sank for a while I thought I’d lost all my mails, but it just did some kind of import that took about 3 seconds and all my emails and settings were there.

The most trouble was with Pages. Opened Pages 08 and all my documents were blank! Same with Keynote 08. O dear…

I rang Apple support, here’s one of the great things about Apple – even though my Mac Pro is out of warranty, I get 90 days of FREE phone support with Snow Leopard – not bad for $39!

Apple took about 5 seconds to answer the phone, and about 5 minutes to diagnose and fix the problem. Apparently my automatic software update was confused and I had an old version of Pages 08 (3.0) still there. Upgraded to 3.03 and it was all fixed.

1Password told me it needed to upgrade itself to work with Snow Leopard. It upgraded itself and it works as promised.

Screen Shots instead of being named ‘Picture 1′, ‘Picture 2′ are now named Screenshot followed by the date and time they were taken.

Quicktime has been updated form 7 to 10. QT10 has the familiar share to menu to share straight to Youtube, iTunes or mobile me. THe bad news is that QT10 can’t cut and paste like Quicktime pro could – good thing I still have QT 7. The good news is that it can trim movies (cut off the front and back) straight out of the box without having to upgrade to QT pro.

The only software I have found that won’t work is Macspeech Dictate – a bit disappointing.

Actually I just upgraded and it works, but the upgrade is almost $100 – a good cashcow for Macspeech. I went to their site but couldn’t see any option apart from a paid upgrade.

Overall Snow Leopard works well and things seem to be a bit zippier in the finder and Safari. I’m not blown away by it yet. My mac pro is not real stable, applications crash a couple of times a day, and Snow Leopard has shown no improvement on that. It used to be pages that was crashing the most, but now it’s Macspeech dictate.

UPDATE: Just noticed that my canon imagerunner IR5000 printer DOES NOT WORK with Snow Leopard – and from what I can see there are no drivers for it at this stage. Very disappointing. This is something to be aware of. Thankfully I have a HP8150 that works fine.

UPDATE: Canon have released drivers that will allow you to print to your Image Runner. Download them from here. When you add the Printer, select IP Printer and LPD Daemon, select GEneric Postscript Printer. It doesn’t see all the options like different trays, but it does print at least.

This one is quite an advanced tip.
If you right-click on a file you get a little menu, and if you select ‘open with’ you get a list of all the programs you can open a file with.
After a while of installing new versions of programs, this list can become quite long!
To reset it open up a Terminal window. (from Applications/Utilities) and paste the following line:

/System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user

press return wait about 20 seconds, and your open with menu will be fixed.

I think this only works on 10.4 and it may reset some other things to, like what applications open certain files.

1. Download and run this driver from here.
2. Put a memory card in the phone.
3. Plug in the phone and post a comment here if it works, or if you have to change some settings on the phone. (I have not tested on the bird phone).

Well it seems that OSX won’t recognise any Samsung phones. A bit disappointing given their TV adds on how Macintosh is friendly with everything! I rang Samsung and they said ‘we don’t support macintosh’

So to get my samsung D900i working on OSX I had to do this: (I’m not suggesting you do it for whatever reasons like you might sue me if it doesn’t work, but it worked for me).

1. Download this file: D900iUSB.pkg.zip

2. Run it

3. Put some memory in the mobile phone miniSD slot because it is only the external memory that the phone uses as a USB drive. (I got 2G for $25 so it’s pretty cheap)

4. Go into the USB settings on the phone and set it to USB mass media, not USB modem.

3. Plug in your Samsung D900i and wow, it mounts AND itunes now recognises it and imports the photos automatically!

Note: if you want to SYNC your samsung D900i that is a separate issue, look here.