Even if your disk hasn’t failed (yet), there are other events that can cause data loss. All it takes is a power failure, or even a power spike or brownout; a mistaken file deletion; a virus attack (well, fortunately not that one on a Mac, but you get the idea). To avoid losing important data you must back up regularly. Just how often and when is up to you. But do it!

Bradley Dichter, Rick Matteson and Scott Randall will be talking about backup applications and media and plans to do the backups. Now the folks using Mac OS 10.5 Leopard should know a bit about Time Machine and a external hard drive, but there are plenty of other ways to backup your important files if not your entire hard drive.

There is the most basic method of backing up your work documents, the old just drag them in the Finder to another hard drive, which may be a USB flash drive, a zip disk, a mobile or desktop FireWire or USB or eSATA connected hard disk drive or to another Mac's hard drive, sharing files over the network. Maybe you just drag a copy to another folder on the same drive, which is better than nothing, but doesn't save you from serious directory damage or physical drive failure. There's the option of burning the data files to a CD-R or DVD-R and putting that on a shelf, in case of a damaged or deleted file. Of course the more often you backup your files, the less likely you'll loose some work to an accident. It's better to automate the process with some program to help, and to do a timed backup each day or each week. Rick Matteson will demonstrate the free Carbon Copy Cloner which can be set to do a scheduled backup (in the version 3 releases), and also the $27.95 SuperDuper!. These can do bootable clone and scheduled backups. Bradley will also talk about the free SilverKeeper (not for Leopard) and the $24.95 shareware Déjà Vu preference pane (often used because it's included with the popular Roxio Toast). Bradley will also show us the long-time leader in Mac backup programs; Retrospect (from EMC insignia, formerly from Dantz.)

Scott Randell will show how he uses CDFinder for Macintosh to backup. Most people know about this program as a disk catalogger. It's the only program to take over from the old Iomega FindIt program popular with zip and jaz users of old.

20 years ago, I could backup my important files on my Mac II onto 800K micro-floppies, or an external SCSI hard drive which could also have included the new (at the time, remember they were introduced in 1987) 44 MB SyQuest drive. They were more popular with Mac users than the Iomega Bernoulli Box which seemed to be more popular on the DOS side. The later Iomega Zip drive, at 100MB came out later in late 1994. I used a 4mm DAT tape drive with Retrospect because the SyQuest disk didn't hold much and were expensive. But I digress.

Your first order of business is deciding what to backup, just your documents, perhaps scattered in folders on your Desktop, the whole home folder which includes your music, photos, movies, preferences and your e-mail, or perhaps the whole hard drive. Back in the old days of Mac OS 9, you could backup your hard drive to another drive, just by dragging one drive's icon on top of another and it would copy everything needed. With Mac OS X, there is much that is hidden to the Finder, with all kinds of special extended attributes, so to make a complete and bootable copy of a startup volume, you need some software. It's nice to have a bootable clone of your hard drive for the day it won't boot up anymore. You can then boot off the clone. Apple's Time Machine does not make a bootable drive, but suggest the almost as good scenario where you would, in the emergency, boot off the Leopard install DVD and instead of re-installing Leopard, use the option to restore from a Time Machine created backup set on the designated hard drive. Fine as long as you have the DVD handy.

Carbon Copy Cloner was the first and free program to do this. I found by watching with Activity Monitor, that Carbon Copy Cloner spends little time actually copying data, so I recommend SuperDuper! for copying to a hard drive. The hard drive should connect to the Mac via FireWire, as USB is slower. Not so bad on Intel based Macs, but because the USB driver was not optimized for the PowerPC based Macs, USB 2.0 is far slower than FireWire 400 on the G5 and older Macs. FireWire 800 is faster if you have it, and if you have a eSATA card in your Mac, that would be faster even than FireWire 800. That's assuming of course you buy and external hard drive with these kinds of ports in the first place. Yes, I know, the USB 2.0-only drives are the cheapest.

Say you don't want to spend money on an hard drive for backup. You can use Déjà Vu with Toast to archive folders of your choice to CD or DVD. I've suggested many clients to archive to a series of DVDs with Retrospect for several years and that seems to work well for them. Ideally one should have more than one backup in case of media failure in the backup, so I suggest doing both, a automatic backup to a hard drive and a scheduled but obviously semi-automatic archive onto DVDs. Data on DVDs should last longer than a hard drive, so for important business files, that is the way to go, and use good quality media. Verbatim is good. Best is the gold media, like Delkin or MAM-A (Mitsui) or Verbatim Medical archival discs. Life expectancy (AKA data life) is beyond 100 years.

Anyway, for the backup to work, the files to be backed up can't be in use. Now an incremental backup from one day to the next shouldn't take very long, but many people can't tolerate any interruption in their daily work, so for them the thing to do is schedule the backup to occur after work hours. You can use the Energy Saver system preference panel Schedule... button to have the computer turn on or wake up at say 11 PM weekdays and then configure the backup program of choice to start up, scan for new or changed files and backup starting at say 11:05 PM. Have to leave time for the computer to fully boot up. Many backup programs can automatically shut off the computer when finished or you can configure the Energy Saver panel to shut your computer off after a likely amount of time, say 2 hours, so 1 AM. You can probably look at the program's log to see how long it takes to finish the backup and then give some more leeway for those days when you change more than this sample.

Some members have asked about mirrored hard drives, sometimes referred to as RAID 1. As backup goes, it's rather limited. What happens with a mirrored pair or drives, whatever is written to the primary drive (which mounts on the Mac) is simultaneously (or near-simultaneously) to a second drive of the same size. This can be accomplished in software with Apple's Disk Utility or in hardware with a RAID controller card in the Mac or in an external enclosure with the drives. This arrangement protects you from physical drive failure, but won't protect you from a damaged file, damaged disk directories or accidental file deletion or overwriting. These things happen far more often. By having a copy that is a hour, a day or a week old, you can replace the missing or damaged file with a good copy, even if it is slightly old. Backup file's age is of course a concern, that's why Apple's Time Machine makes a copy to another drive every hour. Ideally then, if the Time Machine backup drive was itself a mirrored pair, that would be great. Another similar strategy would be to backup the Time Machine drive to another periodically in case the TM drive fails. External drives rarely give you advanced warning they are failing, unlike internal ones, where software can monitor the drive's SMART status. One last caveat I'd like to remind people of. You should have a battery backup or UPS for your computer and external hard drives. If the power goes out, if the computer stays alive but the external drive disconnects because it's no longer powered, that can cause directory damage or worse to the external drive. As a matter of course, I also would plug the cable modem, router and USB hub if needed into the battery backup too. Printers and scanners are the type of things that it's not a disaster to loose power for a short while.