Armed only with a system disc, you couldn't get at the hard drive to view or delete the offending files and would be forced to restore or reinstall. Sometimes, for example, a bit of software will install a startup item or a library file that doesn't play nicely with your system or a driver will cause a kernel panic. Unless you have two Macs, a bootable system on an external drive can really save your bacon. They will invariably involve losing some data unless your latest Time Machine backup is very recent. But these latter two are quite drastic moves, for when all else has failed. Booted from the DVD, you can run hardware checks on the Mac's internal hard drive, erase and reinstall the system and restore a Time Machine backup, amongst a few other things. The reason it's so important to have a bootable backup of your OS X system is that in the event of a major problem, troubleshooting and first aid is far easier if you can boot a Mac from a working system.īooting from an OS X install DVD is fine for certain tasks but won't give you much access to the system. Other low cost or free backup applications include iBackup (free) which supports multiple sets of backups, scheduling, networked backups and smart folders and also Synkbackup, which comes in various paid-for versions. That said, it seemed to work fine on our 10.6 MacBook. I've heard that it is once more being actively developed, but I'm happy with my current setup, so I haven't really looked into it.Users with older Macs as well as MobileMe subscribers might want to look at Apple's own venerable Backup application, although since it was superseded by Time Machine, OS X 10.6 doesn't appear to be officially supported. I used to use an old 12" PowerBook G4 as a Retrospect server, but then EMC stopped maintaining Retrospect. (I'd save work to a flash drive in the meantime.) If my house were burgled or destroyed, I'd copy the offsite clone onto my new computer's startup disk (or use Migration Assistant if it were a newer Mac that required a later version of Mac OS), then restore data files from JungleDisk. If my computer were lost or damaged, I'd get back to work by cloning the most recent clone so I could get back to work ASAP (or using the most recent clone as a startup disk if I had a pressing deadlne), then restore the Time Machine backup onto a new startup disk. In the event of a corrupt or accidentally deleted file, I use the Time Machine or JungleDisk backup to restore it. Weekly SuperDuper backups to two external hard drives, one of which is routinely kept offsite in my office. If I've made significant progress on a project while at work, I'll do a JungleDisk backup before popping the laptop into my pannier for the bike ride home.ģ. I have it set up to keep a month's worth of versions. Regular backups of data files via JungleDisk to an Amazon 3S bucket (I aim for every 2-3 days but when traveling it's more or less frequently depending on Internet access). I sometimes tweak the settings to do backups less frequently than the default, but since my main machine is a laptop and doesn't backup to Time Machine while I'm at work, I usually leave it at 60 minutes.Ģ. Time Machine backups via WiFi, using one of the 500 GB drives on my Mac Mini Server as the destination drive. My backup strategy for my main Mac involves the following:ġ.
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