backing up everything

[lauras2009]

Not sure if this is the right forum for this ...

I subscribe to Mozy backup service. I've been backing up all of my work for awhile now.

However what I would really like is to simply back up my entire hard drive, applications and all. I don't have the CDs for some of my applications and I can't really afford to lose them.

Is it possible to back up an entire hard drive on Mozy? How do I do it?

In the event of hard drive failure (or any other reason for catastrophic loss of data) would a complete backup of my hard drive give me everything I need (assuming I could load it onto another physical machine, maybe an incorrect assumption) in order to pick up from where I left off?

Thanks,
Laura S.

 

[MacDawg]

I don't know about Mozy, but Time Machine sounds like what you want
External HDDs are fairly inexpensive these days

I recommend the Western Digital

Time Machine is painless and seamless
Set it and forget it


Woof, Woof - Dawg

 

[coolwater]

I don't know how big your hard drive is, but a 8GB finger flash memory did the trick for me.

 

[iPhoneNYC]

Time Machine is the way to go. I never used to back up at all and now everything is backed up. And I've needed it as well!

 

[ian.maffett]

Time Machine is great however if you just want to clone your disk as it sits today an option that I take advantage of is Carbon Copy Cloner located here:

http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html

It's free.

 

[lauras2009]

What's the difference between backing up and cloning?

For the people who say they've backed up everything -- Will this do the trick if you've had complete hard drive failure and lost everything? i.e., you can simply (if "simply" is the right word) recover your backed up data and put it on a new machine and you're good to go?

 

[MacDawg]

What's the difference between backing up and cloning?

For the people who say they've backed up everything -- Will this do the trick if you've had complete hard drive failure and lost everything? i.e., you can simply (if "simply" is the right word) recover your backed up data and put it on a new machine and you're good to go?

You can do that with either method
I do both on one external HD with separate partitions

Time Machine backs up everything incrementally
If your HD fails, you can restore from TM and be right back where you were
You can also "go back in time" to find deleted files or restore things in an uncorrupted state

A clone makes a "bootable" copy of your current system
If your drive fails, you can actually boot from the clone and be up and running
Time Machine is not bootable

If that is not clear, let me know and I will answer any questions you have

Woof, Woof - Dawg

 

[toolbox]

I use time machine for mine and then carbon clone it to a external drive which i take to work and bring home every couple of weeks

 

[Xavier]

I have one external HD which I partitioned to have two drives.
One is for Time machine. The other I have mad a clone of the harddrive which is bootable. I also use the other partition to store other files that cannot fit on my internal.

 

[nobunaga209]

How much data are we talking about here? A few hundred GB or a few TB's? I've been looking into server options [RAID5] for my backup needs after many years of iTunes, picture uploads, and video rips.

 

[crazycat]

Go with Time Machine or SuperDuper, i use both.