If you are on Mac, you must get SuperDuper! and an External Harddisk for yourself. What is SuperDuper?
SuperDuper is the wildly acclaimed program that makes recovery painless, because it makes creating a fully bootable backup painless. Its incredibly clear, friendly interface is understandable and easy to use.
I discovered SuperDuper about two months ago while trying to install Leopard on my MacBook. I installed it through Vishal’s MacBook (my DVD drive has stopped working). Later I discovered that I screwed up Vishal’s machine, and it wouldn’t boot at all. I had to finally reinstall the OS on Vishal’s machine. Those were horrible 3 days, trying out everything I could to get the two systems to work correctly. But that story some other time.
But I learned my lesson (again!). I should regularly backup. There was too much trust on the machine and a high ego that was coming in the way so far. But I dropped all that.
After much thinking, I got myself a Western Digital My Book 500GB external harddisk. (for INR 6000, that was a good deal too). It supports FireWire (so I can easily boot the Mac off it) and has plenty of space. I was thinking about a 200 or 300GB drive earlier, but went with 500GB because of the price.
And I feel safe about my data now. Everyweek, I connect the disk to my MacBook, run a full backup with SuperDuper! and I am done. It takes only a few minutes to backup the files that have changed from last week and I am certain I can easily access them now.
I don’t use TimeMachine. I think it’s waste of resources, and I don’t need versions of my file. If I delete a file, I delete it for good. I also think SuperDuper! is one of the easiest software for backup. The most important feature is that it leaves the backup drive bootable. So you can simply plug it in and get started – even if your whole disk crashed.
From a careless geek to a peaceful geek – the journey was remarkable! 😉
I’d recommend AceBackup as a cross-platform backup tool. It’s the proverbial Swiss knife of backups, supporting everything from remote to scheduled backup processes.
Later,
Sujeet
Today SuperDuper tech people wrote me “We generally do not recommend MyBook drives. While they’ll work with Intel macs (properly *partitioned* as GUID), they will not work with Power PC macs due to hardware incompatibilities.”