...you should be. Pick up an external USB hard drive for $75 from Amazon (or NCIX.com in Canada), for example, the 320GB My Passport (the four-star WDME3200TN, not the two-star WDBAAA3200ABK), or the fast, shock-resistant 160GB Transcend StoreJet (cnet review).
Next, you'll need backup software. Macs have Time Machine; for PCs, there's a good free one called Macrium Free Edition (reviews 1, 2, 3, 4). It took a couple of hours (if I remember correctly) to back up my 80GB hard drive as a 40GB image on the USB drive. After that, you can open the image as its own drive letter—just takes a few seconds to open.
I plan to back up my hard drive weekly. The ability to restore individual files is useful.
Weekly isn't enough! Time Machine will do hourly unless you tell it not to, and a good thing too.
ReplyDeleteI dropped a glass of water on my laptop the other day, destroying it. I had a complete backup of everything from 54 minutes before. So good!
Hourly sounds great. Do you back up to a USB hard drive? Which model do you have?
ReplyDeleteBeen using DirSync Pro for the past year and am very satisfied. It has a decent GUI and offers most of the features provided by rsync.
ReplyDeletehttp://directorysync.sourceforge.net