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alauzon · Dec 27, 2003, 06:50 AM

I everybody. I have used a powermac G4 933 at the office for almost 2 years now on a network that has unix and windows 2000 servers. I have never backed up anything on my mac. I know that I'm playing with fire as anything can happen and I would loose all my stuff. I'm now ready to set things so I can back up my hard drive, but I don't know where to start. What I would want to have is an external hard drive, maybe 100gig, to back up everything from the main drive to the new one. And when I mean everything, I mean 10.3,all my programs,(including virtual pc), all my data, my photos from iPhoto and my music from itunes. Anyway, you get the picture. I want a setup that is simple to do. I want something set up that if my internal drive on my mac dies, I can continue working right away on the external drive.

Thank you for your help.

mousehouse · Dec 27, 2003, 10:00 AM

if you get an external HD that has at least the size of your current drive you can clone your sourcedrive (yes really!) to the external one and even boot from the external drive. it's a complete mirror...

the tool you need is Carbon Copy Cloner, and you can find it on http://www.apple.com/downloads/ or versiontracker.com

good luck and get that backup ASAP!

Switched2Mac · Dec 27, 2003, 10:24 AM

You could also get a .MAC account and backup some important smaller data to their 100 meg portion.

But more importantly, you could download Backup 2 from the .MAC area and use it to backup your data to an external hard drive.

alauzon · Dec 29, 2003, 07:03 AM

Thank you very much for the help. I'll keep you posted.

CatOne · Dec 29, 2003, 10:54 AM

Originally posted by Switched2Mac:
You could also get a .MAC account and backup some important smaller data to their 100 meg portion.

But more importantly, you could download Backup 2 from the .MAC area and use it to backup your data to an external hard drive.

.Mac backup isn't the appropriate tool for doing what he wants... he wants a COMPLETE clone of his system.

Carbon Copy Cloner is the best tool for the job (www.bombich.com). Carbon Copy Cloner is basically a pretty front end for the built in utilities in OS X -- you can do everything CCC does from the command line, but CCC makes it easy to do via point and click.