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.

Cur­tis asks:

I bought a new drive and am par­ti­tion­ing it to limit how much Time Machine uses. How big should I make the partition?

Short Answer: I’d say around 25% larger than what your computer’s hard drive size.

Back­ing up is SO impor­tant, and Apple’s new oper­at­ing sys­tem includes a very pow­er­ful and easy to use appli­ca­tion called Time Machine. All you need is an exter­nal drive to backup to, and you’re good to go!

To under­stand how much space you need, you should know how Time Machine works. The first time you backup, it backs up your whole hard drive. From then on when it backs up your com­puter, it only backs up what you’ve changed. Once your backup drive is full, you can set Time Machine to delete old backups.

My lappie’s drive is 120GB and my 160GB backup drive is EASILY big enough!

If you aren’t deleting/adding tons of files on a daily, or even weekly basis, a backup drive that’s slightly big­ger than your hard drive, like 25%, is more than enough. That being said, hard drive space is CHEAP, and you’ll never wish you bought some­thing smaller — A 500GB USB 2.0 drive from Future Shop is only $119!