Well, not really. I know we’ve harped on this before but backing up your precious data is Always a Good Thing and Never a Bad Thing. But what do you do if you need to get up and running again from your full backup, in as little time as possible? Macworld’s Mac 911 blog offers some suggestions. The first is to build yourself a RAID system (that’s “redundant array of independent disks”) where carbon copies of your data can be stored on each hard disk. Obviously, this involves two or more hard drives.
Suggestion Two is to create a bootable backup plan, with the assistance of a utility like Carbon Copy Cloner, or SuperDuper! Using either of these utilities, or a similar program, you can copy the contents of your whole hard drive to a backup disk; no worries about hidden files or “you can’t do that!” warnings from the Finder. End result? When your beloved computer’s hard drive dies its final death (and someday it will), you can plug in your backup drive and keep working. Hurrah.
Of course, it does help if backups are routine, like brushing one’s teeth. Otherwise, what good is a backup last created March 1, 2007 if your hard drive waits until May 15, 2007 to die? How many songs, photos, documents, etc. have been created or collected in that brief time? I’m guessing the answer is, “quite a darn few.”
Man. And I thought backing up once a month was sufficient. I just purchased a portable hard drive yesterday and backed up all my docs, pics, music. It took about 30 minutes to get all my data there. Its hard to do that on a weekly basis.
i knwo is bad, but i don't back up :(
well, i save things on my external hard drive, like music videos and songs, but if THAT dies, i'm screwed. the only reason i those things are stored there and not in my computer is because apple hasn't released a laptop or a consumer desktop with a hard drive big enough to acomodate all of today's ginormous video files out there... a 3 minute music video in dvd quality will run about 150-200mb in size... and i have A LOT of those... if i ever lost my external hard drive, i would never be able to retrieve that data i don't think :(
RAID aside from mirrored drives is a bad idea for backup media.
I back up twice a day at work. Good thing too, my drive died last week. The data we're collecting at work indicates that hard drives aren't coming close to their promised mean time to failure (this has been verified by other sources). Laptop drives in particular are prone to failure.
If you aren't backing up, I suggest you start now. At the very least, pick up Leopard and an external hard drive when it becomes available (I expect to migrate to TimeMachine shortly after I get my hands (that's right, I'm staying away from the cheesy pun) on Leopard).