Question

Backing Up MAC Data

Asked by: jhyiesla

I know that this is probably a loaded question, like asking what's the best AV solution.

But I'm interested in the "best" solution(s) for backing up data on my Mac. I'm running Snow Leopard, I have a 1 TB external disk as well as a MobileMe account with iDisk.

What I am doing currently is using the backup program that I downloaded from my Mobile Me account. I am backing up my home folder and all subfolders to the external disk and I am backing up critical data, photos, and my emails to iDisk as well.

I'd like to have a better strategy as to what I use to backup to the external disk and to iDisk on my MobileMe site. I realize that I can use Time Machine and I am not opposed to doing that.

Given that I want to back some things up to the external and also to iDisk, what really are my best options as far as efficiently backing up to these resources and for doing restores that I can get detailed on?  I want to be able to restore whole folders if necessary or just a single file from either the external drive or iDisk.

This Question has been solved and asker verified All Experts Exchange premium technology solutions are available to subscription members.

Subscribe now for full access to Experts Exchange and get

Instant Access to this Solution

  • Plus...
  • 30 Day FREE access, no risk, no obligation
  • Collaborate with the world's top tech experts
  • Unlimited access to our exclusive solution database
  • Never be left without tech help again

Subscribe Now

Asked On
2009-10-05 at 15:10:32ID24787214
Tags

Mac OS X Backup Snow Leoaprd

Topics

Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard)

,

Snow Leopard (OS 10.6)

,

Backup & Restore Software

Participating Experts
2
Points
500
Comments
7

Trusted by hundreds of thousands everyday for fast, accurate and reliable tech support.

  • "The time we save is the biggest benefit of Experts Exchange to Warner Bros. What could take multiple guys 2 hours or more each to find is accessed in around 15 minutes on Experts Exchange." Mike Kapnisakis, Warner Bros.
  • "Our team likes having a resource that is more secure than just using Google and most experts using this service really know their stuff. It's nice to look here first versus using Google." Dayna Sellner, Lockheed Martin
  • "Anytime that I've been stumped with a problem, 9 out of 10 times Experts Exchange has either the accepted solution or an open discussion of the potential solution to the problem." Kenny Red, eBay Inc.

See what Experts Exchange can do for you.

Got a question?

We've got the answer.

Experts Exchange has been collecting answers to technology questions since 1996…3 million and counting! If you have a question, chances are we already have your answer.

Screenshot of Experts Exchange Knowledgebase

Need individual assistance?

Our experts are ready to help.

If you can't find the exact answer you're looking for, ask our exclusive community of 50,000 experts. You’ll get a personalized answer from a trusted professional.

Screenshot of Experts Exchange Knowledgebase

Want to learn from the best?

Read articles from industry experts.

Thousands of free tech tips, tricks, how-to’s and tutorials are available in our peer reviewed articles section. See for yourself how smart our experts are, no login required.

Screenshot of an Article

Working on a long term project?

Store your work and research.

Save solutions to your questions, answers you’ve discovered through searching plus helpful articles in your personal knowledgebase for easy future access.

Screenshot of Experts Exchange Knowledgebase

Access the answers to your technology questions today.

Subscribe Now

30-day free trial. Register in 60 seconds.

What Makes Experts Exchange Unique?

Members of the expert community talk about why the experience at Experts Exchange is different than what you will find anywhere else.

Trusted by the world's most respected brands.

image of each brand's logo

Faithfully serving IT professionals since 1996.

Experts Exchange Logo

Try it out and discover for yourself.

Subscribe Now

30-day free trial. Register in 60 seconds.

Related Solutions

  1. Upload Photo for a Mac
    I have an upload photo feature for a web based tool I'am creating. Things work great except for the fact that my photo upload doesn't seem to work on the Mac. Here is the code I'am using now. <form action="graphicsadmin.cfm" method="post" enctype="...
  2. How do I setup and FTP Server on a Mac running Leopard.
    How do I setup an FTP Server on a Mac running Leopard? I want to be able to FTP into the Mac machine from a Windows workstation. Thank You
  3. Leopard server
    Can someone tell me if it is any big deal to load Leopard server, and configure. I have minimal experience with Mac but extensive years with pc's. I have no trouble installing Windows server and configuring and seeting up active directory accounts. I have a customer that ha...
  4. Mobile accounts in Snow Leopard
    I am trying to enable mobile accounts on my Macbook Pro running snow leopard. It is authenticating to Active Directory and is Showing my AD home folder but it is using a local mac home folder and just picking up my docs from the server and placing it in the dock. When i goto...

Free Tech Articles

  1. WARNING: 5 Reasons why you should NEVER fix a computer for free.
    It is in our nature to love the puzzle. We are obsessed. The lot of us. We love puzzles. We love the challenge. We thrive on finding the answer. We hate disarray. It bothers us deep in our soul. W...
  2. SCCM OSD Basic troubleshooting
    SCCM 2007 OSD is a fantastic way to deploy operating systems, however, like most things SCCM issues can sometimes be difficult to resolve due to the sheer volume of logs to sift through and the dispe...
  3. Migrate Small Business Server 2003 to Exchange 2010 and Windows 2008 R2
    This guide is intended to provide step by step instructions on how to migrate from Small Business Server 2003 to Windows 2008 R2 with Exchange 2010. For this migration to work you will need the fo...
  4. Create a Win7 Gadget
    This article shows you how to create a simple "Gadget" -- a sort of mini-application supported by Windows 7 and Vista. Gadgets can be dropped anywhere on the desktop to provide instant information, ...
  5. Outlook continually prompting for username and password
    There have been a lot of questions recently regarding Outlook prompting for a username and password whilst using Exchange 2007. There are a few reasons why this would happen and I will try to cover t...
  6. Backup Exchange 2010 Information Store using Windows Backup
    There seems to be quite a lot of confusion around the ability to backup Exchange 2010 using the built in Windows Backup feature. This stems from the omission of this feature prior to Exchange 2007 s...

Cloud Class Webinars

  1. Avoiding Bugs in Microsoft Access
    Alison Balter takes and in-depth look at avoiding bugs in Access. In this webinar you will learn about using the immediate window to debug your applications, invoking the debugger, using breakpoints to troubleshoot, stepping through code, setting the next statement to execute, ...
  2. Top 10 Best New Features in Visio 2010
    Scott Helmers gives live demonstrations of the top 10 new features in Visio 2010. This webinar will teach you how to create compelling diagrams by adding shapes to the page with a single click, linking the shapes in a diagram to data in Excel (or SQL Server, or SharePoint), ...
  3. IT Consultant Business Secrets Revealed
    Michael Munger, Experts Exchange tech pro and IT consultant, pulls back the curtain on his very successful businesses and answers question on every IT consultant and business owner should know about. He shares secrets on what he did to solve the 5 most common problems in IT, ...
  4. Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity
    Quest CTO, Mike Billon, gives an overview of the steps involved in building a dunamic disaster recovery plan. Through case studies and an examination of software/hardware tooles for monitoring and testing, you'll gain a better understandin of where you are, where you want ...
  5. Organize Your Visio Diagrams with Containers and Lists
    Scott Helmers uses cross functional flowcharts, wireframe diagrams, data graphic legends and seating charts to teach you: how to ustilize all three new structured diagram components in Visio 2010, the best practices for organizeing shapes in previous version of Visio, how to organize ...
  6. How to Us Objects, Properties, Events and Methods in Microsoft Access
    Alison Dalter gives an in-depbth look at objects, properties, events and methods in Microsoft Access. In this webinar you will learn about using the object browser, referring to objects, working with properties and methods, working with object variables, understanding the ...

Join the Community

Give a Little. Get a Lot.

Join the community of experts here and help other tech pros by answering question in your area of expertise. You can earn FREE access to all Experts Exchange's premium features and resources.

Join the Community

Answers

 

by: timace-ukPosted on 2009-10-05 at 17:06:54ID: 25501020

Time Machine works seemlessly as long as you remember to plug in your hard drive, if you partition your external drive you can select how much space you want to dedicate to it, if not superduper (just google it) is pretty good for getting everything and making it bootable etc... I used superduper to create an image that i roll out accross a network

there's my advice!

 

by: vallisPosted on 2009-10-05 at 17:37:55ID: 25501119

As a Mac newbie I wouldn't presume to advise you on this       jhyiesla. However, I have a couple of observations which may be useful  or not.

Yesterday I made a mess of my MacBook and iMac while trying unsuccessfully to sync TextExpander (using DropBox) and Entourage between the two. To sort out the mess I decided to restore both machines from my Time Machine backups.

It worked perfectly and I was back to square one within an hour. My iMac's Time Machine is on an external 1TB USB drive and my MacBooks is on a separate partition (I installed a 500GB drive on it). I expected the USB restore to be slow, but in fact it took about 40 minutes and the MacBook partion to partition backup was slower at about an hour. Both machines have about 80GB of data.

I've been an Acronis True Image and BootIt-NG user for Windows and Linux for several years and I'm happy to find that Time Machine is every bit as effective as those excellent programs and once one acclimatises to the totally different philosophy it's a pleasure to use.

I've also been using Evernote for some months and DropBox for a whole 24 hours to co-ordinate cloud and local storage of data files across my 2 Macs and my now-rarely-used dual-boot Ubuntu 9.04/Windows 7 machine.

My Evernote experience:
http://mywitsend.co.nz/computer-stuff/software/725

Evernote is outstanding, particularly for those data (text, pdfs, photos and other graphics) which need to be easily and quickly searchable and DropBox is excellent for currently edited data files like Word docs and spreadsheets. No more worries about syncing between machines. All of the many reviews I've looked at have been scathing of MobileMe and sing the praises of DropBox.

For email I've concluded that life for users of more than one PC is much less stressful if you use web-based mail. I forward my multitudinous email accounts to Gmail. I suppose if you're finding MobileMe useful you won't have a problem in that regard.

With Windows I've always used a separate partition for all my data so that I can restore my OS partition from an image  without affecting my current data. That strategy also reduces the size of images. I don't suppose that's a practicable strategy with OS X but with Toime Machine's flexibility it's hardly an issue.

:)

Alan.

 

by: jhyieslaPosted on 2009-10-06 at 06:17:07ID: 25504615

timace-uk  Thanx for the input. I do use TM at work and have considered using it at home as well.  Any thoughts on backing up to iDisk?  The Apple backup app works OK, but I think the restore isn't as friendly as something like TM.  Do you know if there is a "better" way to back up to iDisk other than just drag and drop files; which doesn't give me the incremental backups I would like to have?

 

by: jhyieslaPosted on 2009-10-06 at 06:19:44ID: 25504640

vallis  Don't worry about being new at this.  We all have strengths and weaknesses.
Appreciate your comments. I probably should just use TM for the external drive. But I'd still like to use the Mobile Me iDisk account since I am paying for it and as far as storing things works well.  As I noted above to the other expert, backup works, but not sure that the restore will give me the granularity that I need and just dragging and dropping files will not give me the advantage of incremental backups.

 

by: vallisPosted on 2009-10-06 at 09:39:33ID: 25506987

The comments of Roger Wilmut here may give you some ideas about backups to iDisk:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1817673&tstart=0

and on his blog:
http://homepage.mac.com/rfwilmut/notes/backup.html

"Twin" claims to be able to back up to iDisk:
http://www.app4mac.com/store/index.php?target=products&product_id=21

As you may know, DropBox is free for 20GB of storage. The "per GB" price for 50GB DropBox accounts ($9.95/month) is much cheaper than MobileMe's 20GB  of which 10GB is allocated to email.

Unless the user has an iPhone to sync there doesn't seem to be a lot of incentive to use MM.


 

by: jhyieslaPosted on 2009-10-06 at 09:46:35ID: 25507071

vallis, thanx, I'll check out those links.

I do have an iPhone so do use the sync features of MM as well as their web page hosting and Back To My Mac.

 

by: jhyieslaPosted on 2009-10-09 at 10:53:35ID: 31637447

Thanx to both of you.  I think that I'm just going to activate Time Machine for my local save.  Not sure what I'm going to do yet for the iDisk save.  Backup seems to work "OK", but the links that Vallis provided discuss some interesting alternatives.

20120131-EE-VQP-002

3 Ways to Join

30-Day Free Trial

The Experts

98% positive feedback on 31,087 answers since March 2000. angeliii is a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for his work with MS SQL Server & Develoment.

He has also proven his knowledge of Visual Basic Programming, PHP Scripting and Oracle Databases.

The Experts

97% positive feedback on 10,752 answers since July 2000. lrmoore has more than 18 years experience in the networking industry.

The six-time Mircosoft MVPs specialties include firewalls, virtual private networking, and network management.

Testimonials

"...and excellent source for support... Kind of like having your very own IT dept." Electriciansnet

Testimonials

"I was apprehensive at signing up at first. However... it has already made my life as an IT administrator much easier." JaCrews

Testimonials

"WOW! You guys have great, active, and knowledgeable people on here." moore50

Business Clients

Business Clients

In the Press

"If you’ve got a question... Experts Exchange can supply an answer.”

In the Press

"...an invaluable aid for both IT professionals and those who require tech support."

In the Press

"where IT professionals provide quick answers on just about any topic"

Business Account Plans

Loading Advertisement...