[earthlings]

Question with a jump drive.

So if I need to backup everything on my computer, I just drag everything from the HD to the jump drive? And if I get more documents, and want to save them on the disk... can I drag the HD in again and the jump drive will automatically know which document is new?

[peeb]

Everything? How big is your jump drive? If you mean documents and applications, just drag and drop them - settings are a bit more complicated.
If you get more documents, the easiest thing is just to drag your documents folder to the drive again, and it will ask you whether you want to replace existing copies or not.

If what you actually have is an external drive large enough to mirror your main drive, that's much better - you can use SuperDuper to duplicate the drive, and then have a bootable backup.

When Leopard gets here, it will backup automatically to an external drive.

[earthlings]

It's large enough to hold everything.
I don't have a lot of documents, because my pb crashed earlier this year which I lost everything because I didn't know how to backup everything or really thought of it.

Thanks for the reply, peeb.

[peeb]

No problem - just dragging and dropping your docs folder will do it.

[~bash $]

If it can fit, it might be prudent to grab the Library folder in your home folder too. A lot of little things get put in there you might want to save. In fact, if you take your entire home folder and can fit it on the drive, you'll be in great shape.

[Simon]

/Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility > Restore
• drag your boot partition into the source field
• drag your external drive to the destination field
• hit restore

It will make a clone of your entire boot partition. This clone is bootable too, so if you happen to lose all your stuff (your drive goes bad, your Mac gets stolen, etc.) you just boot from the clone and clone back to a new drive or new Mac. It's included with every OS X installation for free.

[peeb]

That would be ideal, but the OP is talking about a jump drive.