More than once a week I find myself listening to the lower left palm rest of a friend's Macbook or Macbook Pro. I'm listening for grinding, whirring, or the fatal click, click, silence that signifies the death of yet another 2.5" notebook hard drive. Then comes the fun part - I get to tell the owner that the reason their computer has stopped working is that their hard drive has crashed, and while it will probably be covered under warranty, all their data- the six-page essay they've been working on for a week, all their digital photos, their (pirated) movies, and illegal music downloads are all gone. Forever.
This is certainly not just a Mac problem, and is actually just as common in PC notebooks. However, all your data can be secured and backed up extraordinarily easily. Now this is not something to put on your todo list. This is not something to do next week, or whenever you get around to it. This is something to do today. You should be making backups of your important data weekly at the least. There are many utilities that can help you with this, but before we get into those, we need to find a place to store those backups that will be made.
There are two options for this: Online, or an external hard drive.
Online options are relatively limited and tend to cost a bit more than external hard drive solutions. However, in return for this extra expense, your backups are available to you anywhere you have an internet connection, and there's no way for this data to be lost if there's a catastrophe such as a fire where everything could be destroyed. The top three options here are Amazon's S3 service, Box.net and Apple's .Mac service.
Amazon's service is unlimited, but charges you for putting data on the server, removing it, and storing it. This is infinitely secure, very automated, and has the highest capacity of any online service, but charges you for it accordingly. Pricing information is about half way down on the description page linked above.
Box.net gets you one gig for free, with 5 or 15 gigabyte services available for a fee. There is no automation like there is with both the Amazon and .Mac services, but if you're looking to backup only the essentials, the free gig is better than nothing.
Apple's .Mac option gives you many many things in addition to online storage with automated backups, but gives you 10 gigs online with fully integrated functionality for $100/year ($8.33/month)
Moving away from online options, external hard drives are getting very affordable, and with all the available backup solutions, there's really no reason not to pick one of these up to save your data. Once you have an external hard drive (links to hard drive deals at the bottom), here are a few options for back up utilities: Time Machine, Carbon Copy Cloner, and SuperDuper
My favorite: Time Machine. Mac OSX 10.5 comes with this feature built in and setup couldn't be simpler. You plug in your hard drive, your computer asks you if you want to use this hard drive for backup, you say yes, and you're done. Your computer backs up hourly in the background and keeps those hourly backups for 24 hours. You accidentally deleted an email you got this morning? No problem, Time Machine has a copy. Time Machine saves the hourly backups for the past 24 hours, daily backups for the past month, and weekly backups for everything older than a month. Price is free with Leopard, or $129 for the upgrade
My second favorite: Carbon Copy Cloner. Bombich software released version 3.1 of this fantastic software just a few days ago. The program creates a carbon copy of your hard drive onto an external one. If your hard drive crashes entirely, hold down the option key and boot from the external straight into the system just the way you left it. Easy, simple, and best of all, free! (Donations accepted)
A third option I've also used is SuperDuper. This is by far the most customizable, but with that comes additional setup time and effort that I just don't like to spend. If you have specific files or intervals you'd like to backup by, this is the option for you. $27.95
Free trials are available for all of the above, but no matter which works best for you, don't wait! Spend the small investment of time and/or money to save your data!
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