Any good Backup software for the Mac?

Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
In 15 years of using hard drives, I've just suffered my first hard disk failure. Thanks Toshiba. First time I've used one of your drives and the first to fail. It seems that having my Mini on 24/7 and folding@home writing to the disk every 5 minutes was too much for this drive.



Anyway, having got a bit over confident as I haven't had any hard drive issues since the days of Windows 95. I had an incompatability between Win95 and some hard drive software made by the manufacturer of that hard drive. Every so often it would screw up the hard drive directory structure, rendering the drive useless without a reformat.



... Get back on track ... OK. So, I haven't been backing up my data. Luckily I managed to backup most of the stuff last night by copying it to another drive. But this morning the Mac is back to not booting. When I could boot yesterday, Disk utility said the drive was failing. I'd been getting the beach ball a lot recently and then over Saturday night/Sunday morning, the Mac started hanging.



Is there any good free or fairly cheap backup software that you would recommend which you can schedule and is not only able to backup the Pictures/Movies/Music/Documents folders but also email, address book, calendar stuff etc to any available drive?



Thanks

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 5
    I hear people mention Carbon Copy Cloner favorably, but I haven't used it myself...
  • Reply 2 of 5
    nofeernofeer Posts: 2,427member
    didn't want to start a new post but

    i would like to get an external backup hard drive

    but ..... network or wired

    i've got 3 computers on my wireless airport system ibook g4, imac g3 and a dell 8100 laptop



    sooo how would i set up a network backup hardrive to do this. or should i just get a 250gb with firewire usb 2.0/1.1 and do it manually for each unit??



    then which to buy, maccentral says owc and iomega others say maxtor onetouch (maybe that onetouch is a gimmick, consumers like it though)
  • Reply 3 of 5
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Jootec from Mars

    Is there any good free or fairly cheap backup software that you would recommend which you can schedule and is not only able to backup the Pictures/Movies/Music/Documents folders but also email, address book, calendar stuff etc to any available drive?



    Yes, Go to VersionTracker. Do a search for backup freeware. Read the reviews and pick one. I have used Carbon Copy Cloner and LaCieSilverKeeper they seem good. But, don't just take my opinion. Good luck.
  • Reply 4 of 5
    I use and like Carbon Copy Cloner. YMMV.
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