Do You Backup Your Data?

In the WWDC keynote, Steve Jobs pointed out that only 25% of all mac users backup any of their data, and only 4% of that backup their entire drives. I’m part of that 4%, and this entry will give you some tips and some software suggestions so you can start backing your entire drive up. First, if you have a .Mac account, Apple has a utility that can help you back up your hard drive. But I use a better application, that is called Super Duper. Super Duper allows you to choose from many different types of backups, your whole disk, or just part, and will let you create a schedule to backup, or to do what it calls “Smart Update” which after the first backup, would only copy what has changed to your backup hard disk. Super Duper does require you to have a external hard drive for the copies, and my suggestion is a Lacie 300 GB drive, USB 2.0 and Firewire 400/ 800. Since all internal mac laptop drives can’t exceed 110 GB, you’ll also get some extra space, but to utilize that you’ll need to partition the hard drive using Apple’s Disk Utility app (location: /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app). Also, these two solutions just may be better than Time Machine coming with 10.5, who knows?