Back Up Strategy...Got One?

Or is it something you know you should do but just haven't gotten around to yet?

Serious subject *for a change*

Think about it...How much of yourself (and your life) is tangled up in computer(s)? Think about it.

How much of that would you be willing to live without if you had something catastrophic happen to your computer? Could you recover? Would you? And how much of a pain in the ass would it be?

I have been in this position before ~ More than once...How many of us have been working on a big Word doc or excel Spreadsheet (or whatever flavor of software you use) when the application locks up and you've lost it all?

Okay multiply that on a massive scale ~ And your hard drive gives up the ghost...What are your choices? Did you do regular backups? Or was it more of a "It cannot happen to me, my computer is inviolate"! before the crash.

Or more of an I know I need to do it ~ I'll get to it when I get to it. I have to admit ~ this was my strategy until I upgraded to OS 10.5. And even after that for a while. I started using Time Machine, the back up software that is bundled with OSX. It copies to an external drive the incremental changes that take place on my system every hour. But this is not a disk image of the machine. So it would be of some help, but certainly not the be all and end all.

To that end ~ A few months ago I purchased a Seagate FreeAgent™ desktop 320 GB USB Hard Drive. These work with both Macs and PCs and are relatively inexpensive. And it had been sitting around not doing much for a couple of months'

But what Software to couple with it? There are a lot of software solutions out there. OSX doesn't really come with a viable piece of SW for backup unless you are a .mac subscriber. (Which I declined to become) Maybe one day, but not right now.

I finally settled on Shirt Pocket's SuperDuper. Installed it last night and did a full backup *while I was sleeping*.

I can now have relative piece of mind knowing that my valuable stuff is backed up...And will continue to be...

And to that end, my next project will be moving my iTunes Library to a portable hard drive...

X-posted: TexasT's Invades LiveJournal