Do you back up your most important stuff?

I keep hearing about people losing heaps of important stuff so I thought I should give you all a reminder to back up your stuff (as I run my kinda-daily backup). 

infinite-lock-560x560 Do you back up your most important stuff?

There is no need to argue toward this one. You know that you keep your photos, your music, your work and much more on your computer these days and you already know that you should be backing it up but you never get around to it, right? 

It’s not fun but it is worth spending a few minutes setting up.

Here’s how (yes, I’m assuming you have a mac): 

  1. Plug in a portable hard drive to use as your backup drive. 
  2. Search Spotlight for “Time Machine”.
  3. Push the “ON” button. 
  4. Select the portable hard drive from the list. 
  5. Push go, and wait for it to do the first backup. 

That was easy wasn’t it? Just remember to plug it in every day and you’ve got a full backup of your stuff. You might like to add a reminder in your calendar to plug in the drive every few days to keep it current, or you could buy the Apple Time Capsule and it will automatically update over the wireless network. 

Congratulations – all your stuff is safe now!

By Ross Hill - April 27th, 2009 at 1:08pm with 958 views -

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  • Kip
    An interesting article. I have written a small blog post about backing stuff up online if you are interested.
    http://www.evilmunky.com/?p=1277
  • Yeah I basically use Flickr for that purpose, as well as sharing. It works really well.
  • @snarkle. There's a good video about online photo services on http://commoncraft.com. In short, sign up to a service and use it to back up your favourites, even if you don't plan to share them there.
  • @Ross - Yes, Jungle Disk gives me a weekly report on what was uploaded and when. Makes it quick and easy to ensure everything was backed up. The other services don't (at least that In know of)
  • @Tim so do you ever check that your backups work? :)

    @Martinjy yeah that's a common issue I think - wifi has its limits so if you plan on doing wireless backups it is generally easier to do the first complete one by ethernet. I actually use Time Machine with an external drive so I have to plug it in by USB every time.

    @snarkle yeah that's actually what sparked this post for me. I'm about to go and buy some blank DVDs for the photo collection. The highlights are on Flickr already but I want to have better photo backups. I'm also going to print the highlights to paper with a Qoop book, because they're awesome.
  • snarkle
    The only other piece of advice I would give is to not keep your portable drive NEAR your computer. If your home/office is burgled, you don't want to lose both your laptop AND your backup.

    I mention this because this is what happened to a friend of mine. All of his families digital photos; gone!
  • "5. Push go, and wait for it to do the first backup".

    This is true, but the "wait" could be some time.

    I set my Time Machine to make its first backup last night - after buying Leopard on Friday and installing it on Saturday - and it had only done 10gb in 8 hours by the time I checked it this morning. :-0

    Perhaps it's so slow because I'm doing it over wifi - my HDD is connected to my Airport Extreme.

    Anyway, back up peoples!
  • Good to see you're giving people a nudge Ross! Backup is still often forgotten in this day and age!

    I use Time Machine, but I also utilise a few online backup solutions. For my Macs I use BackBlaze, which constantly uploads changed files. For PCs I use Jungle Disk, but have also used Carbonite. All have been very good and give me an extra sense of security. The biggest advantage of online solutions is I don't need to think about them like I do Time Machine.

    However, no matter what way you do it, any backup is better than none!
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