Backing Up Everything on Your Hard Drive
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Each backup-type has its various advantages and disadvantages, but most importantly, don't trust everything to a single system. If you can, you should back-up using both the incremental and system cloning methods; this would require either a very large, partitioned external hard drive, or two smaller separate drives. Also, make sure you verify and test your backups before you trust them. Don't wait until you've already lost a hard drive to discover that your backups are corrupted.
On-Site Hard Drive Backup Tools for Mac OS X
Incremental Backup Tool - TimeMachine:
At the very least, you should use use TimeMachine. It comes installed with every current copy of OS X. If you are running OS 10.5 or later, you already have it. Use it. Here's how:
Buy an external hard drive at least 1.5x the size of your system's hard drive.
- Plug it in.
- When TimeMachine asks if you wish to use this new drive for backups, answer "yes".
- If this doesn't happen, you may have to go into your System Preferences and turn TimeMachine on.
- Depending on how the drive was shipped, you may need to format it using the Disk Utility program before OS X will recognize it.
- Whenever your computer is at home, plug it into your external hard drive and turn it on.
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