Mac backup

[ColinJ]

I don't know anything about Macs. My nephew has one with a fantastic huge HD screen which must be about 28" diagonal. I've no idea what model it is.

He has loads of photos and music downloads on it and I wanted to buy him a backup drive for his birthday. When his Windows laptop HDD failed he was really upset when he lost his personal files and I'd like to make sure it can't happen with his Mac.

I can only afford to spend about £50-60 so I was thinking about buying him something like this 500GB USB portable disk drive. Would that do the job (if necessary, after reformatting it)? If not, could you recommend something in that price range that will - cheers!

 

[phil_hg_uk]

Yes just use time machine on the mac.

 

[ColinJ]

Thanks Phil - that was quick!

Ah - Time Machine - right, that looks straightforward! I'll wait a while to see if anybody suggests a better drive for the money, but if not, I'll order one.

 

[phil_hg_uk]

Just use any drive you want as macs can also read pc drives I often transfer files between my mac and pc using a standard USB flash drive formatted for FAT32.

Personally I like these CLICK ME I have sold lots of them and never had any problems and I currently use one with my mac.

 

[ColinJ]

And get him to use TimeMachineEditor as Time Machine backs up at silly intervals (like every hour) and you can use it to set your own backup interval and time (and it's a free download).

Blimey - you'd have thought that Apple would have included a backup interval control in the Time Machine software!

 

[phil_hg_uk]

Blimey - you'd have thought that Apple would have included a backup interval control in the Time Machine software!

Colin apple stuff is surprisingly primative at some things, they seem to care more about how the stuff looks, just look at the iPhone.

I dont use the Time Machine software myself I just manually copy any files I want to save, the problem with Time Machine is that you end up with your backup drive full of copies of the same thing.

 

[redcard]

Hourly? I didn't even notice it was backing up so regularly.

 

[redcard]

Colin apple stuff is surprisingly primative at some things, they seem to care more about how the stuff looks, just look at the iPhone.

 

[phil_hg_uk]

 

[jamin100]

Personally I don't use time machine. Here's my backup system.

24 inch iMac with 1tb hard drive.
USB connected 1tb drive which does a nightly incremental backup using carbon copy cloner software (free)

1tb USB drive connected to my apple router which does wireless backups once a week.

1tb portable USB drive which I do a full system clone on once a month and keep it off site.

All of the above is done with carbon copy cloner which is a great piece of software.

And where backups are concerned always follow this simple rule

"if your data doesent exist in at least 3 different places, then it doesn't exist at all"

 

[ColinJ]

I can see your point jamin100, but money is tight. With just the local USB backup drive, my nephew wouldn't be protected against fire, theft or perhaps a serious local lightning strike but I think we can live with those threats. Apart from that, it would be the small risk of the system drive and the backup drive both failing at the same time.

 

[phil_hg_uk]

I can see your point jamin100, but money is tight. With just the local USB backup drive, my nephew wouldn't be protected against fire, theft or perhaps a serious local lightning strike but I think we can live with those threats. Apart from that, it would be the small risk of the system drive and the backup drive both failing at the same time.

You could also install dropbox or some other free online storage as an extra backup colin.

 

[ColinJ]

You could also install dropbox or some other free online storage as an extra backup colin.

Great minds think alike! I was just considering that, but came to the conclusion that uploading GBs of data at 0.5 - 1.0 Mb/s would take an awfully long time!

Another potential drawback with online backup is that 'unlimited internet' nearly always translates to 'unlimited, except for the limits imposed by our fair usage policy'! (How ISPs get away with that, I don't know!)

The odd GB of online backup might be okay, but once it gets to be 100s of GB, it doesn't seem very practical.

 

[phil_hg_uk]

Great minds think alike! I was just considering that, but came to the conclusion that uploading GBs of data at 0.5 - 1.0 Mb/s would take an awfully long time!

Another potential drawback with online backup is that 'unlimited internet' nearly always translates to 'unlimited, except for the limits imposed by our fair usage policy'! (How ISPs get away with that, I don't know!)

The odd GB of online backup might be okay, but once it gets to be 100s of GB, it doesn't seem very practical.

When I do my backups I do 3 different backups plus an online backup, the online backup is only for very important stuff and it is between 400 - 800mb each time so I just do it last thing before I shut the PC down. I wouldnt try to back everything up as it would take too long as you have pointed out but it is good for important stuff.

 

[ColinJ]

I know from witnessing the traumas of errant colleagues how important work backups are. One of my friends lost a hard drive which contained all the work he'd done in one year, and of which he had no backup copies, not even any printouts of it. The company had paid him £20k to do that work, so you can bet that they valued it at £50k-100k!

He looked physically sick when he went to tell the departmental manager! I think they had to send the drive to be rebuilt in a data recovery specialist's clean room, at enormous expense.

My nephew would be very upset to lose his music collection, photos and video clips but we are not talking 'mission-critical' data here. I think the USB backup drive should give him most of the protection he needs, and I'll also suggest that he should burn his favourite stuff onto DVDs.