Backing up the hard drive

I recently purchased a 500gb external drive and wanted to backup my hard drive. is there a simple way to do it without having to purchase .mac?

Any help would be great! thanks!

ibackup i use it all the time to backup my hard drive in my macbook pro

Why would you need .Mac? It is only required if you want to backup your local data on apple's servers.

If you have your own 500GB HDD, you can use apps like SuperDuper, or even wait for Leopard's Time Machine for backups...

SuperDuper! is the way to go if you're looking to have a bootable backup. If not looking for a bootable backup - you can just drag-n-drop the files that you want to back up.

I just hook up my home PC and my mac via ethernet cable and create a shared folder and just drag and drop all of my stuff that I want to backup! It is FAST I could backup 11 gigs in 30 minutes. Wonder if superduper can make a bootable drive in my PC's HD?

Have your tried to see if your hard drive came with any backup programs? Mine didn't come with any discs, because the programs were all ready on the hard drive. I backed up 55 GB onto my WD MyBook today through firewire and it took about 1 hour and 40 minutes.