it's be nice if the "no problem" state were black instead of green. it's a little thing, but isn't attention to little things what makes OS X so great?

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I have an external hard drive that is the same size as my internal drive. Carbon Copy Cloner wakes up once a week to keep them both in synch. I also recommend making your backup drive bootable. Something happened on my internal drive once that screwed it up big time. I simply booted from the backup and cloned it back onto my internal drive. It worked like a charm.

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Cool Stuff.
Just want to point out that s.m.a.r.t monitoring is not always that reliable. About two months ago my hard drive started making some strange noises and the smart condition became "failing". I was out of cash (its really not cheap having the hdd changed in a powerbook!) and just said "ok, I'll do daily backups and see how long before my hdd dies completely". Anyway, it's now running fine (no noise and smart status "verified"), and I don't plan to change my hdd any time soon! (but I still do the daily backups heh).

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at work, we use retrospect for daily incremantal backups. from what i've seen, superduper and ccc DON'T do incremantal backups, they clone.

for my home macs, i'd like to find an effective, shareware app to do incremantal backups. any reccomendations?

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I use a client calles "Chronosync" by Econ Technologies. It's pretty flexible, programmable, and full-featured. Granted, I've not used many other clients, but I'm happy with Chronosync.

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If you want some really detailed SMART info, get smartmontools

http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/

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Interesting timing on this article, since my hard drive failed yesterday afternoon!

I'd known something was wrong for about a week, since the drive had been making unusual sounds, and in the last four days OS X froze (hard reboot required) on me at least a dozen times. I'll echo the earlier comment that the SMART status is not very reliable, as it still indicated that the drive was fine when I checked it an hour before the drive died completely. After it died I used Disk Utility from the Tiger install disk and it confirmed that the drive was in fact toast.

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I back up my important information daily (bookmarks, mail, stickies, contacts) to the iDisk using Backup 3.

One day my Stickies database just winked out. And I keep a lot of info in my stickies. It's my most favorite Apple app. I retrieved my backup with a few clicks and continued where I left off.

I have no pity for the people who don't make regular backups of their data and subsequently lose it. Maybe it's because they don't expect their computers to fail...but computers are devices and even the most reliable system can be brought to its knees by outside sources.

My parents had a computer fry due to brownouts after Hurricane Rita. Surge Protector bars protect against sudden surges but can't really help with flickering or dirty power. If it had caused the HD to crash hard, all of their files would have been toast. (Fortunately, I had backed up their Documents folder a month ago to CDs) They bought a UPS backup a few days after replacing out the power supply.

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What is that calendar icon in your menu bar?

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I'm having a horror story rightr now. I upgraded to Missing Sync 5.0 (see my comments in that post) and lost all of my addresses and IM addresses in Address Book. I'm trying to restore Address Book from my iDisk (I run backup every Friday), but Backup is unable to locate the data. I might have just lost 250 addresses.

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Just yesterday I had a harddrive failure on my Powerbook 15inch. What really bummed me out was that I just got my iPod (video) in the mail and now I can't sync up my playlists and such because they're all gone. Fortunately I back up my school work on my shuffle daily, and backed up other files (pictures, music) a month ago.

But now I have to be laptopless for a week to install a new harddrive in, not to mention doing an re-install of everything.. bah!

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I am still grumpy about Apple not offering Backup 3 for download or for sale seperate from .mac. I have no use for iDisk or any of the other .mac options. I just want Backup 3 :)

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Disk Utility + external FireWire hard drive + discipline = weekly bootable backup

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I also use ChronoSync, though not for backups. More for sync-ing folders between portable drives and home and work computers. I honestly don't do religious backups of my home systems. I do, however, make backups of staff machines where I work. These are done using a command-line tool called rsync. If you're scared of the command-line, rsync may not be for you, but it has several advantages over many other utilities:
1) It's free and included with Mac OSX
2) It works with compression over a network
3) It can be automated with shell scripts and cron
4) It does incremental and mirror backups

I don't know if rsync can clone a bootable system (I think it can). But if you're willing to spend some time in the Terminal, it's great for user data backups.

NOTE: The Tiger version of rsync will handle resource forks, as long as the rsync version matches between systems. Pre-Tiger, resource-for-aware versions of rsync can be found at versiontracker.

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This post inspired me to do a backup of my mac at school. I wanted to back up my files to an external drive, and also wanted to sync my desktop and PowerBook. I really wanted a free program that would do this for me, and found one (that's free for students like me). It's called Synk ( http://www.decimus.net/synk/ ), and it seems to be working fine. It can backup and/or synchronize, and has options for scheduling. Check it out.

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Retrospect is unquestionably the best product out there - especially given it's cross platform support - we've got it running on many mac, windows, and linux servers backing up to a couple terrabytes worth of disk space. Unfortunately, it's expensive. I've also heard good things about BackJack (www.backjack.com) but that's also a pay service, with a setup fee, etc. But to be frank, a complete hard drive failure is not necessarily the end of your data - if you've got the bucks, and you like to gamble, there are quite a few companies that'll bring your drive into a clean room, crack it open and load the platters into their own equipment and get the data back to you, but at a cost usually much greater than the cost of Retrospect or a backup service. Drive Savers (drivesavers.com) is one of the best that I've heard of (but their services start at about $600).

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Carbon copy cloner does have a sync option that I use to make regular backups. I think you have to install another program for the sync option to be available.

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I highly recommend Deja Vu. It's a System Pref that can automate Daily, Weekly, and Monthly backups.

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