Filed under: OS, Software, Tips and tricks
Disks fail so backup
Most Mac users can rest easy at night, content with the fact that their machines are spyware free, and all but virus free as well. However, there is a fly in the ointment of Mac bliss and that is the undeniable fact that entropy increases.What does that mean for my Mac? Hardware failure, my friends, if it hasn't happened to you in the past you can count on it happening to you in the future. Hard disks crash, RAM goes bad, and batteries catch on fire, all rendering that expensive Mac of yours into a very tasteful paperweight.
The road to happiness lies with backing up your data on a regular basis, and Apple is there for you with this KB article detailing, 'How to back up and restore your important Mac OS X 10.4 files.' This is a must read for all Mac users on Tiger.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Jerry Zigmont said 4:19PM on 6-16-2005
I've been using a Mac since the IIVX came out. Never had a bad disk or data loss, so I'm pretty cavalier about backing up.
The article got me thinking, though......
However, the apple doc only covers the essentials like, contacts, bookmarks, key chain etc... Is there currently a full disk backup solution for Tiger since Carbon Copy Cloner is apparently not going to be updated soon?
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Al said 4:19PM on 6-16-2005
http://www.versiontracker.com/php/search.php?mode=basic&action=search&str=Tiger+Backup&plt%5B%5D=macosx&x=0&y=0
At least one of these should work...
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Logan said 4:19PM on 6-16-2005
OR you could use "Backup" and shedule an automatic daily backup at midnight to an external HDD, like me. :-)
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Jeffrey Billings said 4:19PM on 6-16-2005
Backup, backup, backup. We suffered the ultimate hardware failure. On May 4, 2003 our business was wiped out by a category 4 tornado. Luckily I had a backup 60gb external hard drive at HOME with a backup on it.
Backing up doesn't do any good unless you've got an off-site backup too.
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Michael Sykes said 12:07PM on 6-21-2005
I loved Carbon Copy Cloner, so it's a shame it won't be back soon. I too have never had disk failure on a Mac (knock on wood!!), but these days I've become pretty good about backing things up - I figure that my number is going to be up sooner or later.
And even if as Mac zealots we (unreasonably) decide that Apple makes products that never fail, remember they don't make the hard drives. They buy them from the same people as everyone else, so have limited control over their quality - kind of like all the bad batteries they have been buying recently.
And if you are really interested in your data, remember not to keep all your backups in the same physical location. 4 firewire drives won't do you any good if they are all sitting right beside each other in a fire, or stolen by someone.
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