Backing Up - Do it

It wont happen to me is no protection.
For those that have not thought about their computer having a mechanical failure, this shows my 4 minute smart/incremental back up by 800 Firewire using SuperDuper.


Click for full size

Snow Leopard - 3000 photos - 40 odd music discs = 275,000 files giving 72GB

When Logic board failed on MBPro i used same HD connected to my wife's iMac Firewire 800 and continued working for the 2 weeks MBP was away.
When i had the MBP back, i copied latest changes back from Ext HD to MBP and all was up to date. Plan for it - mechanical failure does happen.

It's not a question of "if" it will happen, it's a question of when it will happen.

Honestly, I wish no retailer would let a computer buyer walk out of the store without an external hard drive that is equal to or greater than the size of their internal drive. There was a time when backing up was tedious and expensive. Today, there is no excuse.

And if you're wondering how long a full back up might take - here is my first SuperDuper! backup after a clean install.

Only 118GB in 62 minutes. Done while browsing the forum.

bob is that FW800 or FW400 and 118GB is more than 10.6 - your user files as well?

I have my whole system backed up on a Ex HD using time machine. Does this mean i have a bootable copy on it so if anything goes wrong with my HD that i can boot from that?
I also have superduper and have never used it. Will doing a complete backup with SD achieve a bootable backup ??
Just trying to understand the difference,and what advantages either one has over the others. There is probably threads out there on it, but as you stared one with Back Up - Do It i thought you could include the advantages and differences 1 over the other... If there is any ..

Cheers

tattooedmac said:

I have my whole system backed up on a Ex HD using time machine. Does this mean i have a bootable copy on it so if anything goes wrong with my HD that i can boot from that?
I also have superduper and have never used it. Will doing a complete backup with SD achieve a bootable backup ??

Click to expand...

No to the first question, yes to the second. However, you can easily recover with a Time Machine backup as it's one of the options from the Leopard/Snow Leopard boot disc.

That's a clean install with everything except iTunes restored & it is FW800.

Don't worry about iTunes backup on my Mac any longer. Currently entire music and video library is backed up in 2 locations and iTunes 9 just makes it too easy to shuffle things around according to personal preference on each machine.

I also currently have three bootable backups on a single external drive to include, Leopard just prior to upgrading, SL just prior to clean install and my now current install of SL.