Tammy Camp

How To Back Up Your Hard Drive In Mac OS X

Posted on 12. Jun, 2009 by Tammy Camp in Mac, Technology

Jeff, a hard-working 1L law student with a heart of gold, is burning the midnight oil again working on a paper for tomorrow morning.

At 2:13 AM, as he reaches over to take a sip from his third cup of coffee, he accidentally knocks it over, spilling the contents all over his MacBook.

AAAAAAAGGGGGHHHHH!!!!

F&#*ING PIECE OF $#!+!!!

His paper, due at 9:00 AM, is gone, along with dozens of essential papers and notes.

Hundreds, maybe thousands, of personal photos lost, never to be seen again.

Thousands of songs, some of them actually legally purchased, made up his carefully crafted iTunes collection, which now needs to be rebuilt from scratch.

He doesn’t have the several thousands of dollars in cash that it would take to professionally recover the data.

…But wait a minute…

Jeff is actually fine. He knows how important it is to back up his files, so he has his hard drive cloned using SuperDuper on an external Western Digital Passport, and he’s been emailing updated drafts of his paper to himself on his Gmail account every 30 minutes.

Things certainly could be better. His laptop is toast, and that will cost a thousand bucks to replace. He’ll be working out of the school’s computer cluster for the rest of the semester until he saves up to buy a new one.

But things could also be MUCH worse.

If you’re thinking this won’t happen to you, think again. From my days working IT as a university student, I know that laptop hard drives fail, on average, within two years of purchase. It’s happened to me and almost all of my friends who use laptops.

How do we keep this nightmare scenario from happening?

Back up your files.

You’ve heard it before, several times. Now it’s time to do it.

It isn’t that hard. It’s not as simple as putting on your seat belt, but it’s close. Once you have the backup hard drive and the software, you’re all set.

Which brand for a hard drive?

Western Digital and Seagate have outstanding reputations. I’ve also seen consistently solid reviews for LaCie.

I use a Western Digital Passport with a USB 2.0 cable. (Having a Firewire drive makes things much faster.) It has worked well for me for 3 years, even before I had Time Machine, and it is small enough to fit in my pocket.

Just make sure your backup drive holds more space in GB than your laptop or desktop drive.

*NOTE: Windows users can go here or here for software recommendations.

Time Machine Or Cloning?

I used to use Time Machine, but I recently dumped it so I could clone my hard drive. SuperDuper and Carbon Copy Cloner both create “bootable” exact backups of your laptop hard drive. This means it is a 1-to-1 copy with the operating system installed and everything. If your hard drive dies, you can plug in the backup and run your computer off of it.

For me, cloning was a more important feature than having several updated versions of certain documents (which is Time Machine’s specialty).

Technically, if you really want to, you can use both a cloning program and Time Machine. All you need to do is buy a large enough hard drive and “partition” it (split it into two separately dedicated sections). But I won’t go into more detail here.

SuperDuper Or Carbon Copy Cloner?

I’ve heard that Carbon Copy Cloner is very reliable.

I have personal experience with SuperDuper, and I recommend it. Apparently it is better than Carbon Copy Cloner by a hair, and costs a bit more, but I made the investment because I didn’t want to scrimp when I backed up my files.

With an 80 GB laptop hard drive and the Western Digital USB Passport mentioned above, the entire SuperDuper backup took about 3 hours.

Can the backup drive go bad at the very moment I need it?

This rarely happens. And this discussion can quickly devolve into increasing paranoia about how many backups you need and what happens if they all get lost in a fire.

You could get that unlucky once in your life, but you probably won’t, so that won’t be addressed here.

For 99% + of the cases, having one backup and regularly checking on the health of your primary hard drive will be enough.

How do you check up on your hard drive’s health?

• SMARTReporter: This freeware app, once installed, automatically checks on your hard drive and alerts you with a color-coded icon. Green means good, gray means unknown, and red means failing. Simple and useful.
• MainMenu: Another freeware app that can be easily set up to perform maintentance tasks, repair disk permissions on your hard drive, and clean out cache on an automated schedule.

So go back up your files NOW! Protect yourself!

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Tags: Back Up, Mac, Technology