Backing up your Mac

[krissel]

Lots of posts at TS are questions about backing up and this page is a decent starting point for information on the subject.

http://macs.about.com/od/usingyourmac/tp/backuphub.htm

[jcarter]

Nice link, I need to be 'reminded'  Ive lots of great pictures and stuff.
Thanks,
Jane

[kcourt]

 Well, I should have read this post before today.  

Yesterday, my hard disk died, well, almost died!  I have two external hard drives, but did not set one up as a back-up boot disk. Should have had Carbon Copy Cloner - it was on my to-do list, but  I never followed through on this.    

I spent all day yesterday at the apple store and they discovered that my old hard disc was really near death, already in hospice care! The "genius" installed a new hard disk, and today I am in the process of trying to save anything I can from this old disk before it dies completely.  For example, I tried to download all my photos - it took from 6Am to 1:30PM to download these.  I am in the process of importing them into iPhoto now. Fortunately, I was able to save all of my music - I have a bunch of it - and had saved it on one of my external disks.

When this is done, I will disconnect the old disk, reinstall all of my applications and upgrades - should be at this for quite a while, all because I didn't prepare for the inevitable.  


Kathy

[Mayo]

I learned something about SuperDuper! the other day that I should have known but did not: scheduled backups don't happen when the Mac is in sleep mode. That fact is in the SD! user guide, albeit modestly emphasized, if at all... And there is no automatic notification that a scheduled backup was unsuccessful.

In this case the failed backup was a good thing, because I fully expected data that I inadvertently erased using ShredItX to be missing from the copy too; it would be missing if the previous night's backup had occurred. But the data was still on the copy and I just had to drag it back to the iMac.   (Twice I have somehow selected everything on my Desktop and then securely erased it; I still haven't figured out how I did it. Fortunately, the stuff that I leave in folder on my desktop is usually b.s. like URLs for articles, downloads, etc. so it is usually replaceable or not worth worrying about...)

[RNKIII]

Mayo, is the 'sleep mode' you refer to in your post different from 'a nap' or what ever it is that my 20" iMac G5, does when I leave it 'unused' over night???   Because I've never had SD! miss a backup for any reason other than an 'unavailable' HDD when I inadvertently turned the power to the external off over night!!

Just wondering...

Bob K.  rnkiii

[sandbox]

It's free and it works great http://www.lacie.com/silverkeeper/

[Mayo]

QUOTE

Mayo, is the 'sleep mode' you refer to in your post different from 'a nap' or what ever it is that my 20" iMac G5, does when I leave it 'unused' over night???

"Sleep" refers to when the Mac's drive "spins down" and the display turns off.  The Mac is in low-power mode but it isn't turned off, which is what I presume your Mac is doing if you haven't shut if off before going to bed...

Here is what it says in the SD! user guide:

"If your Macintosh is asleep when the time comes to run the backup,
SuperDuper!’s scheduling won’t wake it up, so the backup won’t run.
The way to handle this is to use the Energy Saver Preference Pane in
System Preferences to schedule a wake (or “start up”) event for a
minute before the backup is scheduled to run."

In the Energy Saver Preference Pane I see options to start-up and shut-down, but nothing that would let me schedule additional "wake from sleep" events... I already use the start-up option every day at 5:55am.

[Xairbusdriver]

Not sure what version of the OS you're using, but the Energy Saver Preference Panel on our two Machines have a "Start up or wake up" choice in the "Schedule" section.

[Mayo]

10.5.5 has the same options... the problem is that you can only schedule one "start up or wake up." I already automatically start it up in the early AM; the iMac then sleeps during the day when I'm not using it.  There may be a third-party utility that offers more scheduling options.

[george]

Intel iMac OS 10.5.5
Boy am I glad that I have been using Time Machine as I said in another thread I inadvertently deleted my Windows partition and was obliged to re-install Leopard then use Boot Camp to re-install the Windows partition and now all is well. On completion of Leopard installation the option given is do you want to transfer from Time Machine? when that finished I found that the only loss was all my e-mail received and sent were deleted but not e-mail addresses.
Time Machine turned out to be a Dream Machine.
George

[sandbox]

Using SilverKeeper my Mac's will awake from sleep to perform on schedule.

QUOTE

If your computer is sleeping at the scheduled time, it will awaken to perform the Backup Action. So, after setting  up the desired Actions, you do not need to keep SilverKeeper application running.

[Xairbusdriver]

QUOTE

There may be a third-party utility that offers more scheduling options.

Or, you could set the CPU to never sleep (screen sleeping is not a problem, of course, and highly recommended to avoid image burn-in) and then give it something useful to do like the Protein folding app in my sig.