Backup to Maxtor External Drive
Hi,
First of all, I'm new to this sort of thing, so please excuse my ignorance. I've never backed anything up before, so I'm not really familiar with any standard caveats outside of keeping your backup in a location seperate from the computer.
Second, please direct me to another thread if I'm in the wrong place. I've looked around, and this seemed like the best thread.
Third, thanks in advance for any help/advice.
I just bought a 1TB Maxtor OneTouch4 Plus external hard drive, thinking it'd be a good idea to backup my computer (17" 1.83 GHz Intel 10.4.11). Additionally, I've already partitioned the drive so I can backup my macBook too. It appears that the default set of folders that the drive wants to backup are /Documents, /Movies, /Pictures, and /Music. I guess my question is are there other folders/files I should necessarily backup; /Applications for instance? Should I just backup the entire Macintosh HD instead? Is this sufficient, or am I even approaching this correctly? Do I need yet another program, or is the Maxtor software good enough? Also, I'm interested in backing up my inbox in Mail. Is this yet a seperate issue?
It sounds from the thread like just backing up and making a 'bootable' backup are seperate issues. What makes a backup bootable? I think it means you can start the OS from the disk, but when does this become an advantage?