Backing Up Your Mac’s Files Is Easy With ChronoSync
The Mac360 routine for a discussion on backing up your Mac consists of a little fear mongering. Imagine this scenario. You start up your Mac and nothing happens.
Your Mac’s hard drive is dead, and all your files—music, photos, documents, utilities, applications, movie clips, email, everything—is gone.
What do you do? What’s your backup strategy? Here is half of my strategy for practicing safe Mac.
The need to back up your Mac’s files is in direct proportion to the.... (excerpted).
5 Reader Comments
Jared B. said:
I am one of the fortunate ones. I own a quad pro. Actually Ron when time machine is an internal hard drive such as mine it restores pretty fast. I had to use it once and I don’t think it took longer than a half hour. I was under 200 gigs then, now I am pushing 317.9 gigs worth of stuff mostly bought from Itunes store. For my clone drive I also use an internal hard drive using super duper. I have never once had a problem with super duper performing a clone. I only keep a 500 gig external fire wire hard drive on the desktop to transfer files to my MacBook from my quad pro. I have by far overcome what I can use Idisk for backing up and or transferring files. I now only buy Sea Gate Barracuda hard drives and no other brand. Maxtor has left me in the dust and so has Western Digital long before those hard drives should have died.
friendofwoz said:
Here’s the problem with these clone and synchro utilities: you have to test them regularly. That means, if you clone your Mac to another hard drive, it pays to start up your Mac from that hard drive to see if it actually cloned and works.
I’ve had a few surprises where I cloned a back up, then a drive died, and I found out my back up drive was corrupted.
Warning. Check the back ups regularly.
Blankmeister said:
The only thing missing from ChronoSync is some kind of always-on Agent which monitors your Mac’s files, then automatically backs them up the way Time Machine does. TM only does it once an hour.
iggy pence said:
I second the emotion for Super Duper and Chrono Sync. I have not lost a file on my Mac since I started cloning the hard drive a few years ago. Between clones I use Chrono Sync to back up important files. The new version actually does a full back up which lets your Mac start up from another drive, all files intact.
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Chas said:
Me three! I regularly use Superduper, and have just started using Chronosync to sync my 3 Macs I currently use. The maker’s of Chronosync also have a great upgrade policy—free upgrades of new versions! I love supporting great software, and these two companies are great examples of why the Mac kicks you-know-what!