Posted by Charlie V.

While some methods are more detailed than others, any system backup is better than nothing. Whether it’s occasionally burning family photos and your music library to CD or employing a robust backup program, the peace of mind knowing your files are safe when your hard drive crashes is priceless. Notice I said when your hard drive crashes, not if your hard drive crashes; it will happen to everyone sometime, I’ve already fallen victim! Luckily, there are things we can do. Most take minimal time (only minutes to set up), and then run themselves as often as you want. I’m going to touch base on two of the most popular backup programs for Mac OS X users today, Time Machine and SuperDuper. 

Time Machine comes standard with Mac OS X.5 Leopard, and is by far the most elegant and easy to use backup system I’ve ever come across… once it was set up. You need to be aware of the system requirements before using Time Machine, including an external hard drive (big enough to hold all of your system files), Airport Extreme (if you want to backup wirelessly) and obviously, Leopard.

Once you have all the required items for Time Machine, and have your external backup hard drive mounted on your desktop, simply start the application in System Preferences [System Preferences > Time Machine > Turn switch to ON]. You can set time machine to backup as often as you’d like, and the advantage to this application over other backups is the ability to view archived documents on the fly without mounting any old disk images, and you can even search your backups with Spotlight! All of this data storage can fill up fast, so I recommend buying the largest backup hard drive in your budget (You can find 500GB hard drives for under $150!). You can set Time Machine to not back up certain files and folders if you wish through system preferences, which can save a great deal of time and hard disk space, but when it comes to back up files, the more the merrier! Next time, I’ll discuss a popular ‘clone’ backup system, SuperDuper.

-Charlie