Official Backup FAQ or Start Backing Up Now!

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chscag

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If you do not have the disks for those "expensive apps" then they are not legally yours anyway and should be removed. Besides, it's likely that copying them to an external hard drive and then attempting to install them again after a fresh install of OS X, will not work.
 
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Well, technically, the apps were sold WITH the Mac. The wholesale company I bought it from (on eBay) knew he was selling those programs to me and he included them in the price I paid. I'm not removing them because I need them for my music, picture, and video production.
 

chscag

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It doesn't matter that the wholesale company sold the programs to you with the machine. Without the original disks, those programs are not licensed to you and are legally not yours. Contact the seller and ask for the disks. If he can't provide them to you, chances are he did not have the right to sell them to you. I would then ask him for a refund for the cost of the programs he illegally sold you.
 
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I'll try contacting him and asking for the discs, but I highly doubt he would refund me the money for all the programs because all together the programs came out to over 2 thousand dollars, and I only paid less than 600 for the MacBook. I also noticed that most of the programs were purchased in the App Store.
 
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He said that he didn't have the discs because his distributor handles that. It's not a big deal to me I don't need to do a restore, but I found that Time Capsule saves all of my applications and files to my external hard dive so I can put them back on my Mac after I restore. The back-up is all done and now I just need to buy the Lion disc, I just want to make sure Time Capsule does what I think it does.
 
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Portable hard drive to use with Tiger 10.4.11?

Help! I am upgrading to Snow Leopard and look forward to using time machine for back ups, but I don't have it yet, and don't yet have a portable hard drive... Any suggestions for one that will work with my Tiger 10.4.11 (On Macbook Pro 2 GHz Memory: 2 GB )? I've been going a bit cross eyed researching this, trying to find a 500GB or 1 TB drive for around $100 or less that will work... Suggestions? I know my MBP is now considered ancient but I do not want Lion and cant find new/refurb running snow leopard!
 
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Backup problem

Lion 10.7.4, MBA 11" mid 2011, OWC 128GB SSD, 2GB RAM. Have used old 64GB drive as backup with Time Machine successfully but now cannot back up because TM reports insufficient space on Backup drive.
Yet TM display says "old back ups will be deleted sequentially"- so what am I missing here?
:\
 
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Some sage advice here. Thanks to the simpleness of Time Machine the Mac pretty much teaches users to back up. The thing is, you don't actually have to worry about backing up as Time Machine will take care of it for you. Fantastic! Before I made the switch I never once made backups.

That being said, if your backup drive fails, your screwed. I just had my 1TB backup drive (which i had in an external enclosure) fail on me. I considered the possibility of it being the enclosure that was faulty but just today I connected the 10,000rpm raptor drive from my old PC to the enclosure and it mounted INSTANTLY and jetted through navigation faster than anything!

This is so depressing for me as I cannot afford the hefty pricetag of an external HDD. I have no backup options now and can't afford any. I'd use the raptor drive but it's only 150GB which is a fraction of my Macs HDD so I can't back up to it. However, I'm gonna have that connected to the enclosure, reformat it and use it for backing up crucial documents only (manually) and see how it holds out. If there are any problems then I'll know it was the enclosure and not the HDD, in which case I can easily replace the enclosure (£10 for a new enclosure is easy for me, but not £60 for an external hdd).

And as a side note I'm brand new here, so hi! :)
 
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Hi I have a question about backing up multiple volumes to a single time capsule volume my set up is as follows

Mac Mini Intel Core 2 Duo running Mountain Lion OS X 10.8.3 (12D78)

Internal Drive 160 GB
External Drive 1TB partitioned into:
TimeMachine Volume 500 GB (for backups)
DataStore 500GB (for extra data storage)

Now my internal drive is automatically backed up on the time machine volume but since I have enough space I'd like to include the Data Store partiton in the back up to Time Machine as well

Is this possible? I can't see how to do it if I click on preferences in time machine I see Time Machine and DataStore listed as exclusions but can't see a way to remove the exclusion from Data Store is the problem that both volumes are on one physical disk? Would I be better with a whole other external drive for Time Machine?

Thanks
 

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goatboy:

Having a second copy of your files on the same hard drive is NOT a backup.
Yes... if you want to "backup" the files on the DataStore partition, you need another drive.
 
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Why you should backup

Clone or System Imaging

Clone or system imaging backups are point-in-time backups that are exact mirrors of your system at the moment the backup is done.

While it's not as flexible nor does it have the multiple versions like Time Machine, the one main advantage of this type of backup is that the drive is bootable. This means you could boot your Mac off this drive if your internal drive won't boot.

Many of our members use this as a secondary backup to their Time Machine. How often you choose to take this image is up to you and depends on the rest of your backup setup and risk tolerance.

There are two great pieces of software to accomplish a clone backup:

Last edited: 07.29.2011
Original thread: Backups, Backups, Backups.

Question: Do you know if this system imaging/clone will also backup any virtual machines installed? I have Parallels Desktop 5 installed on Mac OS X 10.6.8. Yes it's outdated, I plan to get rid of it entirely and upgrade to Mountain Lion and use iWork 09, but before I do that I want to backup and clone my current files and system just in case things go wrong *knock on wood*.

Terima kasih! ("Thank you", in Indonesian language)
 

RavingMac

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I don't know from experience, but don't see why it wouldn't.

Regardless, you should ALWAYS test a clone by booting from it and accessing your files. So, try it and you will have your answer.
 
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Since the virtual machine is a file, yes it will back it up.
 
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Thanks for the answers, I just wanted to be sure because Carbon Copy Cloner is no longer donationware, it's a commercial product. So I didn't want to go ahead and pay for something that turns out not to do what I needed it to do. :)
 
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Partitioning

Hopefully posting this here makes sense... I just bought a WD My Book for Mac 3TB for my iMac. I'm one of those people that thinks he knows more than he does and tends to learn from screwing up, so I guess I need to ask before I do things. What I am looking to do is use this external hard drive for constant backup and purely external storage. I was wondering if I can partition the drive to use 2 TB as just an area to drag and drop anything I don't want stored on my Mac. It will be 90% music and movies. Then I want that leftover 1TB to act as a time machine for what I keep on the Mac. With all of that being said does doing this even make sense? If it makes any difference my iMac is 500GB (should I just use 500GB for the time machine?). I know through reading these posts that you should backup everything but I need more storage space as I am now down to about 90GB left on this iMac and to be honest nothing on here will cause me to jump off a cliff if i lose it. And if this is just a stupid idea and there is an easier more logical way to do this please share it with me. Thanks.
 

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You can do as you propose. Make sure that you create a large enough partition. The general consensus is to have the Time Machine partition be a bit larger than the drive you are backing up. The Time Machine backup could be on the same partition as your other data. I have mine set up that way at the moment though it's not exactly best practice.

The one thing to keep in mind is that should the backup drive fail you could lose both your Time Machine backup and your other data.

Edit: When preparing thhe drive for Time Machine make sure the drive or Time machine partition is formatted as hfs+ extended journaled.
 
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I have the same drive and I have done exactly what you are proposing to do. I've heard it said (here, in fact) that the backup drive should be twice as big as the drive it's backing up, so 1T should be plenty to backup your 500MB iMac. One thing to note: The TM backup will not be bootable, so if the internal drive dies, you'll need to replace it, then either boot from something (install discs?) or reinstall OSX and then restore everything else from the TM backup. As I said, TM backs up the OS, but isn't bootable. An alternative is Carbon Copy Cloner, which makes a clone of your HD, which is then bootable. You can script CCC to run when you want it, and it can archive what it is replacing if you choose to do so. CCC isn't free, TM is.
 
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I got a simple question. Lets say I back up my Mac Mini or my wife's MBA with TM. Then the mac fails for any odd reason and hardware is fried. So I get a new Mac with a newer OS. Can my files be transferred via TM to the new Mac with ease?
 
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Yes, without any issues.
During installation of your new Mac you will have the option to restore backups from Time Machine.

Cheers ... McBie
 
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