Quick and Easy Disk Maintenance and Backup for Your Mac
Page not found | Low End Mac
Welcome Image and Text
We believe in the long term value of Apple hardware. You should be able to use your Apple gear as long as it helps you remain productive and meets your needs, upgrading only as necessary. We want to help maximize the life of your Apple gear.
Many
people have different methods and use different programs for
maintenance and backups of their Macs. I'm going to share my
method, which is what I do every week on my main systems. All of
the software I use is open source or freeware (with donations
always accepted by the authors).
The first thing you want to do before backing up your system is
run your maintenance programs. Apple's Disk Utility works for
fixing your hard drive and repairing permissions, but I prefer an
all-in-one solution.
My pick is AppleJack. With it you can
repair your disk, repair permissions, remove swap files, validate
preference files, and clean up cache files. It's a great (and fast)
program with both auto-made or manual selection for each task. The
best thing that I like about AppleJack is that you run it when you
start your Mac in single user mode (press ctrl-cmd-S), so it will
work even if your Mac is having problems starting up.
Now that you have your system up to par, it's time to back it
up. I connect an external hard drive for backup. I chose iBackup for this.
I know there are more advanced backup programs out there, but I
really like the ease of use that iBackup offers. Features include:
built-in restore option, automatic selections to do backups of your
preferences and applications, set custom profiles, plugin support,
support for burn folder, can automatically compress your files, and
much more. I really love the restore option; I use it when I move
from one Mac to another, and it restore all my Mail settings and
inboxes and all my bookmarks in Safari.
Lastly, now that you've created your backup on an external hard
drive (or on an internal hard drive), you can burn it on a CD or
DVD with Apple's built-in burners. Another way is using Roxio's
Toast, which is free with some burners. I have the paid
version, and it's great for burning backups of my external backup
drive. I know making backups of your backups sounds strange, but
it's always smart to have multiple backups. Toast also has a option
to encrypt your media so no one else can access your backups.
I have a 160 GB external hard drive that I use to back up all my
machines, and I keep the latest backup on it. I have at least the
last three backups for each machine on DVD-RW and even keep a copy
at an off-site location just in case.
On a last note, I don't like making bootable backups because
it's a lot easier (and more fun) to just install whatever newest OS
on the machine you want to restore and then restore your
preferences. Than you're done. I did this when I upgraded to Tiger
from Panther, and Tiger accepted all of my old preferences.
We believe in the long term value of Apple hardware. You should be able to use your Apple gear as long as it helps you remain productive and meets your needs, upgrading only as necessary. We want to help maximize the life of your Apple gear.
We believe in the long term value of Apple hardware. You should be able to use your Apple gear as long as it helps you remain productive and meets your needs, upgrading only as necessary. We want to help maximize the life of your Apple gear.
