Best way to backup harddrive?

I'm going to be installing Leopard soon. I own a WesterDigital HD 500GB and I'm wondering what the best way to back up my harddrive is incase something goes wrong w/ the upgrade. So i simply drag 'Machintosh HD' to the external? is there better ways to do it so that I'm getting program settings, Library, etc things other than music/movies/documents

drag and drop may not copy all files, like hidden files.

use carbon copy cloner or superduper to make a full bootable backup to an external drive.

Macgig is right - use SuperDuper! or Carbon Copy Cloner. I've posted a video tutorial for CCC on one of my websites:

homepage.mac.com/cjrtools/mac-leopard-tips/leopard-tutorials/ccc-cloning.html


Claire

ok cool. Carbon Copy Cloner looks like the way to go

Question: If I choose to clone will it reformat my external? I have about 100gb of files on it.

Yes, cloning will erase the data on the disk because it will create an exact copy of your drive. Can you transfer the data on the WD drive to your main drive? How large is your main drive? If you use CCC or SuperDuper!, your cloned drive should be approximately the same size as the main drive. I partition my drives so that I can keep the main Mac OS X 10.5 partition relatively small and I store data on the other partitions.

Claire

My main hard drive is 120gb (but I only have about 5gb left).

My external is 500gb and I'm probably using half of that.

I do alot of videos and such so thats what I have all on my external. So its not any option to put the external hard drive on my main drive

Does partioning this solve that? I'm backing up so I can install leopard. Would I have to partion anyway if i use time machine?

Or should I just get another external hard drive and use that soley as backup.