So you've decided that it would be a good plan, to back up your Mac. Good for you. As we've said in the previous articles you really need a backup strategy, only you knows what data you want to backup.
I have various machines and they all get treated differently, some get full backups using Retrospect, some I use PsyncX , some I just copy files to a CD or DVD, some machines I don't backup at all !
You have to first think, If my Mac was to crash and the hard drive was completely dead, how would I go about getting yourself back up and running.
This is really determined by your Mac system knowledge, and the backup strategy that you have in place. If you have fairly limited system knowledge then a full backup strategy (as per part 2) using Retrospect or similar would probably be best for you. I say this because in the event of a serious crash or having a new hard drive installed, you would be able to get out your backup disks and reload you Mac to exactly where is was before.
If however you are fairly happy with the Mac OS then you might just make a note of your important system settings (pen and paper !), such as tcp/ip settings for you broadband connection etc. You would then probably just do copy of some description, (whether it be done manually or by using backup software), of you important files to a cd or dvd etc.
Since OS X came out it has been a lot harder for people to implement a good backup schedule, a lot of the software, retrospect included, was very buggy at first and it made it very difficult to backup easily.
Decide what it is that you want to backup, first. Do you really need to back up you complete iTunes library, (when they are all on your iPod and of course you have all the original cd's) or would it just be nice to backup the important things like email messages, preference files etc.
If you are familiar with the Mac OS and using the terminal then you can always just back up the files you want, such as:
In Mac OS X the system-wide Preferences files are located in /Library/Preferences
Since each user has his or her own folder full of preference files as well, uou might want to back these up as well /Users/~/Library/Preferences.
(Often the leading /Users/ is omitted since the location of the user home directory does not change, leaving us with ~/Library/Preferences in shorthand.)
If you want to back up your mail then Open a new Finder window.
Copy those files to cd/dvd etc.
There are ways of backing your mac up using various shareware tools and other utilities such as Carbon Copy Cloner, RsyncX , You Sync, and one of the best is PsyncX, I use PsyncX all the time, very good.
I will put some more technical ways to backup using the terminal in part 4...
I have various machines and they all get treated differently, some get full backups using Retrospect, some I use PsyncX , some I just copy files to a CD or DVD, some machines I don't backup at all !
You have to first think, If my Mac was to crash and the hard drive was completely dead, how would I go about getting yourself back up and running.
This is really determined by your Mac system knowledge, and the backup strategy that you have in place. If you have fairly limited system knowledge then a full backup strategy (as per part 2) using Retrospect or similar would probably be best for you. I say this because in the event of a serious crash or having a new hard drive installed, you would be able to get out your backup disks and reload you Mac to exactly where is was before.
If however you are fairly happy with the Mac OS then you might just make a note of your important system settings (pen and paper !), such as tcp/ip settings for you broadband connection etc. You would then probably just do copy of some description, (whether it be done manually or by using backup software), of you important files to a cd or dvd etc.
Since OS X came out it has been a lot harder for people to implement a good backup schedule, a lot of the software, retrospect included, was very buggy at first and it made it very difficult to backup easily.
Decide what it is that you want to backup, first. Do you really need to back up you complete iTunes library, (when they are all on your iPod and of course you have all the original cd's) or would it just be nice to backup the important things like email messages, preference files etc.
If you are familiar with the Mac OS and using the terminal then you can always just back up the files you want, such as:
In Mac OS X the system-wide Preferences files are located in /Library/Preferences
Since each user has his or her own folder full of preference files as well, uou might want to back these up as well /Users/~/Library/Preferences.
(Often the leading /Users/ is omitted since the location of the user home directory does not change, leaving us with ~/Library/Preferences in shorthand.)
If you want to back up your mail then Open a new Finder window.
- Go to your home directory.
- You can use the Home toolbar button or
- select Go | Home from the menu to go home.
- Open the Library/Mail directory.
Copy those files to cd/dvd etc.
There are ways of backing your mac up using various shareware tools and other utilities such as Carbon Copy Cloner, RsyncX , You Sync, and one of the best is PsyncX, I use PsyncX all the time, very good.
I will put some more technical ways to backup using the terminal in part 4...