Good Backup Primer

More from Macworld--"Easy Mac Backups" is a good article on backing up your Mac. It explains the value of a bootable backup and off-site backup. Goes over different ways of handling backups and retrieving those backups. There's also some MacWorld reviews of the major Mac backup software. The lowdown--Retrospect has the most features & capabilities but it's got a steep learning curve. They recommend ProSoft's Data Backup. I haven't used it, but I've known about ProSoft because their program Data Rescue offers the hope of retreiving files after a drive goes bad.

At home, I use Apple's Backup 'cause it's so easy. I also use Retrospect Express to do a bootable backup of my iBook every now and then, especially before I do a major upgrade of my OS. Retrospect Express is nice because it comes included with a lot of hard drives, like the ones from OWC. At work, I've figured out how to use Retrospect Desktop to backup 4 systems over a network, thanks to this PDF book Take Control of Mac OS Backups. It costs $10 but it's worth it if you have to really understand the ins and outs of backup, and it has a nice addendum just on Retrospect.

Here's my personal backup success story (I have some horror stories too of lost data but I'm trying to keep it upbeat.) Somehow all my contacts from Address Book disappeared. I never figured out how. But it took me about 5 minutes to get it back thanks to my backup with Apple's Backup. An advantage with Apple's Backup is that I didn't have to figure out what file(s) Address Books used to store my contacts in--I just told Backup that I needed my contacts back, and it obliged. Disaster averted.