[SrTec]

If You had 8gb's worth of information that you need to back up for safety precautions and you also had a rewriteable cd burner. Do you make folders and start burning or is there a better way? What is the best way to back up including your system? I'm not looking to spend much more money. What is the most common way that it's done.

[giantmike]

Every person backs up differently. Some backup their entire hard drives, while others only do the imporatant stuff. Also, some people like using Retrospect, while others like just copying files from the hard drive to the backup media. It all depends on how you want to keep your backup, and how easily you want to restore from it if need be. Also, you have to think about how important your data is before backing up (so you know how often, where you want to keep the backups, what media you want to use, etc.) It's different for every person, so really only you can come up with your backup strategy.

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The Mac Information Depot. Why go anywhere else?

[Cipher13]

I'd shove it all in folders, then burn the folders. Easy to do, you know where everything is, and you can access it easily, unlike with retrospect.

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[This message has been edited by Cipher13 (edited 03-28-2001).]

[VRL]

Prioritize, and organize first. I keep my application imstallers and updates in one location and back them up on CDR's. I also use CDR's to back up Photo drives, etc. (pretty cheap to do). Also, I use a little free (and simple) software app called Redux to automatically do my Documents backups (to a firewire drive) since that is most important backup for me. Works like a champ!

As for complete backups, I never worry about backing up all drives, since I have all the installers/updaters organized and ready to use in case there's a disaster (God forbid). This works for me

[bluebean]

Another bit of advice: backup your Preferences folder. BUT if you're using Disc Burner, copy all of the prefs except the Disc Burner image that's been created that sits in the prefs folder.

[OverclockedHomoSapien]

CD-R media is so cheap...for 8 GB you will spend under $10! I don't trust ANY media with important data, so I'd back it up in duplicate on two sets of CD-R (store each set in a different place). At 0.7 GB/ CDR, that comes out to about 2 x 12 = 24 discs.

Here's what you do: Camp out at your computer desk with a 6 pack of fine beer and at least 30 CDr. Cram all your files into folders, size them at approximately 700MB ea. Fire up your burner and start dumping the folders onto CDR. Glug glug glug glug...you will be done backing up before that 6 pack is finished. Pretty easy, huh?

If you're a cheap bastard then I suppose you could use fewer CDR by compressing all of your data before burning it. Since you use Macs you can't be that cheap, but if you are, then dropstuff will squeeze more data onto fewer CDR. It will take time to compress 8GB, so if you decide on this method better make that two 6 packs.

[Gregg]

Retrospect or Retrospect Express will compress the data for you. It will also prompt you for the next disk. If you don't want a folder split onto two disks, then you'll have to burn 'em in groups manually.