What is the best way to back up your MAC?

Is Time Machine excluded because you don’t have Leopard?

A lot of external hard drives come with automatic backup software. It’s usually pretty clunky, but it will get the job done. If you’re hardcore, you could try rsync for complete control.

I use Mozy, because nothing beats automatic offsite backup. I currently have 53GB of my most important data backed up on Mozy’s servers. For the most part, I’ve been very happy with the service, and it’s just $5/month.

I use SuperDuper! to clone my hard drive to an external Firewire one.

Nice, Any others?
Thank You!

As for the Time Machine I do have it but I am looking for redundancy.

Thanks Again!

I know Ben uses an online one, I’ll see if I can get him in here to help you.

Yeah, I’d put in another vote for Mozy. It’s a little slow to do the initial backup, but now it seems to be running smoothly. And I sleep better at night.

I work for a Apple Specialist in San Diego, and our techs use SuperDuper, and Carbon Copy Cloner.

But By Far SuperDuper! All The Way!!

But it really depends on what kind of backup you want to do,
SuperDuper! Can do a bootable backup(the best in my eyes) That will allow you to boot off that external drive if your other hard drive has failed, then you can use SuperDuper! To clone it back.

If you have leopard, Time Machine works well for backups but they are not bootable.

Personally I like SuperDuper!

DVDs. Don’t rely on Hard-Drives.. I’ve heard SuperDuper and Carbon Copy Cloner are great. Haven’t used TimeMachine yet..It actually makes me nervous as its still pretty new.

Also Google: Drobo…sweet little device with a RAID array. Expensive, but great idea

@cmmicek I would have to disagree with that, DVD’s are more likely to break/scratch and lose your data than a hard drive is.

The major problem with the drobo is: USB 2.0 ONLY! That’s a waste of money, The drobo retails for about $400 bucks and you don’t even get firewire or eSata??

haha..are you kidding me? apparently you haven’t had much experience with hard-drive failures. DVDs are the most reliable, ask any video/web developer…and whats wrong with putting them in a DVD wallet? I don’t know about you, but my discs aren’t thrown around..they don’t get scratched.

hard drives can potentially get scratched too—if the header breaks..what do you plan to do if the components in your harddrive fail..what happens if it doesn’t mount? then you’ll say “oh, I remember that guy on Fluther that talked about DVDs…he was right!” don’t get me wrong, I have several back-up harddrives myself..they’re convenient..I just believe DVDs are much safer for data thats crucial.

Warm regards,

(Disclaimer: I work for Mozy)

For those of you using the mac client, I recommend getting the latest version. I think you’ll really like it. </jobs>

You can also get a free account, but the limit is 2GB of backup.

(hopefully this is helpful and not spammy)

or theres noozeez.com/filedropper. Free. 250gb

Thanks Guy, Some good leads! I am currently working on a project where we are trying to develop a course for new computer users that explain all the things that other video tutorials like vtc, mac/win accademy and Lynda.com do not cover. Most of these sites assume that you are pretty good at using you mac or pc already. I see back up as 3 way process, you can back up to an online service, to standard tape or other media that is more sturdy/reliable and last to all sorts of media like a external/internal hard drive, dvd, cd, and or usb stick. I will look into those items next question would be what software do you find more reliable for back ups? Meaning is it just as safe to use something like Toast 7,8,9 to back up or is something like retrospect(is this still being made for the mac?) better? Let me post that later.