Mac backup solutions that don’t cost the earth

Backup? What’s that? Well, yes we could all back up everything, but that takes time and effort and loads of storage space, and you’ll never actually end up needing it. My computer is stable and secure, after all. I’m not going to lose anything, so why bother backing it all up unnecessarily?

If that’s you talking, you’d better read this. Keeping backups of your information doesn’t have to be complicated, time-consuming or expensive. As long as you have the right tools to hand.

Curiously, two of my friends have recently been talking about similar things on their blogs: Phill gave some excellent advice on staying safe on the internet, avoiding the common pitfalls of viruses and spam; and Alex joined in too with some hints on computer security, including anti-virus software, spyware and popups. My contribution is primarily aimed at Mac users, but the idea behind it can be translated across to PC users too.

The first thing you will need in order to make backups is somewhere to back it all up to. Although you can back up onto your main hard disk, or even a secondary hard disk in your computer, it’s generally a better idea to back up onto something external. A USB or Firewire drive is ideal, and these days you can get them without needing to spend a fortune. In fact, if you buy a cheap one you can normally take it apart (voiding your guarantee, of course) and put in a bigger hard disk, as the physical disk inside is just the same as what you’d put in a computer. I’ve got a 250GB Maxtor Firewire drive that I bought second hand.

Next, you’ll need some software to do the backing up for you. With the advent of Mac OS X Leopard and Time Machine this whole process should in theory be effortless and idiot-proof. However, a significant number of us are still stuck on Tiger and will have to make do with third-party software. No problem. After wading through a mountain of links I finally found iBackup, a free backup program that doesn’t suck, and provides all the functionality I need (albeit without the visual wow-factor of Time Machine).

Setting iBackup up is a little fiddly, but that’s why I’m writing this article, to help you along when you get to it. In fact, this advice would work for any basic backup system. Sadly, iBackup doesn’t do incremental backups, which saves a lot of disk space, but we can still make things reasonably efficient with a little common-sense.

I have set my backup schedules up in stages in order to make sure I don’t lose anything critical.

If you have limited space (let’s face it, even 250GB is small these days), you’ll be pleased to know that you don’t have to keep all your backups indefinitely. Daily backups are great, but you don’t need one for every day of the year. If you’re doing weekly backups as well, you can safely get rid of daily backups that are more than two weeks old. Similarly, if you need to restore something from six months ago you’re going to go for a monthly backup rather than a weekly one, so those can be deleted safely after a significant amount of time. It’s up to you what those time-scales are, just be sensible about it and if in doubt leave it where it is. It’s not like it’s going to go off and go mouldy.

So, why make backups? Because when you need it, you’ll be glad of it. Until then it’ll just be working away in the background completely unnoticed, and won’t necessarily be costing you a penny. But rest assured, if you don’t make backups and something goes wrong, no amount of screaming will magic your files back again.

Matthew