Backing Up

Vanessa asks: I really need to get some back up Hard Drive. I’ve heard I need at least 3 HDDs. is that what I use? Also what brand or mem­ory space do you think is required?

On a mac the best back up is a exter­nal firewire HD and then set­ting up time machine. Time machine is Leopard’s built in backup solu­tion and you will need to have Mac OS 10.5 installed to use it. When they say you need 3, they are talk­ing about hav­ing 3 dupli­cates of the data you want to backup. 1 on local machine + 2 Backup HD’s = 3 HDs.

If you want that much stor­age I would rec­om­mend some­thing like the WD mybook mir­ror edi­tion. Like this one above, which is avail­able at Costco for $329. While it may seem like way too much HD space, if you have alot of movie, pic­tures or music you will find a way to fill it up fast. Plus if you use the “Mir­rored” mode you will actu­ally only have 1TB of stor­age as the device had 2 HD’s inside and when you set it up it will mir­ror the dri­ves. This is how peo­ple get the 3 HD’s backup. If one of the dri­ves dies inside the backup the other one still has every­thing on it and you are fine.

How­ever you could go the cheaper route and just buy an exter­nal HD with one HD and you would still be okay. Any­thing bet­ter than no backup is better.

The last option, which I am cur­rently using at both work and home, is to buy an Apple Time Capsule.

While you are only get­ting 1 HD for backup pur­poses, the unit also func­tions as your wire­less router at the new stan­dard “N” speed. It also has a USB port to add a wire­less printer or expand the HDD space with another exter­nal unit. The ben­e­fit you get from back­ing up to this unit is that you never have to con­nect a devise to your mac­book or iMac as it is done wire­lessly. In the past I had been back­ing up with a reg­u­lar USB exter­nal HDD, how­ever, some­times I would go 10–20 days before I would remem­ber to backup. While this never really got me into major trou­ble, I did learn my les­son when a HDD recently died and I almost lost data that would have been backed up, had I con­nected my exter­nal drive. Luck­ily I was able to res­cue the needed files. The Apple Time Cap­sule comes in a 500GB, and 1TB size and cost $329 and $529 respec­tively. How­ever, you can find them cheaper from the Apple Refur­bished Store.