Backups for Apple Laptops

A friend writes to say that he's just gotten an external disk drive for his Apple laptop and asks "What's the best way to backup my iPhoto library?"

Here's my advice.

The first thing you should do is make sure it's formatted for "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)" format.

Most external disks come formatted for PCs using the FAT (File Allocation Table) format which is really crappy for Macs.

You can check with Disk Utility, here's a screen shot of where to look:



If it's not this format and your disk is empty, erase and format it anew (careful, it will delete everything on that disk).

Next, the best way to do backups is with the SuperDuper! program. It will just clone the disk in your laptop to the external drive.

Should your internal drive fail, you can just clone it back after getting it replaced. Even better, you can just boot off of the external drive and run from that while waiting for a new laptop drove. Just hold down the Option key on your keybaord when you turn on your Mac.

SuperDuper! makes an entire clone of your disk. So if you just wanted to restore your iPhoto library, you could go onto that disk and drag a copy of it back to your main disk. Then double click it and iPhoto will open that library.

Also, have you upgraded to Leopard yet? If you have, use TimeMachine! TimeMachine does incremental backups and makes things really easy to restore.

If you haven't upgraded to Leopard, you should really consider it. Time Machine is just one of the many great features.

If you do have Leopard, you can create two separeate volumes on your external disk. Let's say you bought a 250 gb external disk and your internal laptop disk is 80gb. Using Disk Utility, split your external disk into two volumes, one of 80gb and the other with the remainder. Use SuperDuper! to clone your internal disk to the 80gb partition, and give the rest to TimeMachine.

You might ask why you want to use both? The answer is that SuperDuper! makes it trivial to restore your system, and it makes a clone partition that you can litterally boot off of. While restoring from a TimeMachine backup is more involved and slower. However, TimeMachine is better for being able to restore individual files (or images). They're complimentary.