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Security > Disaster Preparation & Recovery

Backup your Mac

By Lasa Information Systems Team

This article outlines some simple strategies for keeping your Mac’s data safe and secure – the why, what and where you should backup to. We also take look at some of the many utilities for backing up your Mac, keeping the hard disk healthy and even restoring lost data.

Why back-up your data?

If your Mac is lost, stolen, damaged beyond repair or merely incapacitated, you can always repair or replace it.  But what about your precious data – that funding bid due in tomorrow, that presentation for the conference, digital photos from your last event?  Without working backups and a backup strategy, you could lose your hard work and precious photos forever.

It can and does happen.  We recently heard about a voluntary sector colleague who was using their personal Mac laptop for work because it had graphic design software installed.  However, disaster struck when the laptop was dropped and broken beyond repair.

According to Apple, only 4% of Mac users back-up regularly. Here are some simple steps to back-up your data.

How to prevent disaster - back it all up now!

The safest thing to do is back-up everything on your Mac by creating a bootable back-up.  This means creating a clone or duplicate of your Mac’s hard disk that can be used to restore the Mac to a point before disaster struck.  Make sure you save the bootable backup to an external hard disk, and if disaster strikes, simply restart the ailing Mac from the external drive using the bootable backup.

Bear in mind that bootable backups take several hours to run and will generate large files that you’ll need a decent sized external hard disk to store them on.  A 400GB external hard disk should be sufficient.

We would also recommend scheduling an automated incremental back-up of your Mac every month.  An incremental back-up will capture files and settings changed since the last backup, rather than generating an entirely new bootable backup from scratch.

There are two great utilities to help you create bootable backups, such as Super Duper (download costs around £14) or the free Carbon Copy Cloner.

Click to view larger image of Carbon Copy Cloner

What to back-up – make it routine

When choosing elements for a regular back-up routine think about your most precious data – Documents, Photos, Databases and Keychain passwords.  Your Mac uses the built-in Keychain utility to manage and stores passwords to user accounts, email accounts, networks, files and websites - think what a pain it would be if you haven’t backed up Keychain and having to remember passwords to get back into email accounts, websites and wireless networks.Again, be sure to schedule automatic incremental back-ups to an external hard disk.  There are a number of useful tools for automating back-up routines, such as Apple’s Backup, Intego Backup X4, and many others reviewed below.

What backup software to use?

Backup software is relatively cheap, especially when you consider how much time, work, and angst you can save yourself.  The following is a rough guide rounding up back-up software currently available for the Mac.  As always, read the small print, try the demo versions and make sure the back-up software meets your needs.

Carbon Copy Cloner:

Clone one hard drive to another, copying every single file to create an exact copy of your source hard drive.  Carbon Copy Cloner can also be used to perform regular scheduled back-ups of your data. Free download from Bombich Software

SuperDuper:

Makes fully bootable back-ups.  Shareware costs around £14. Download from Shirt Pocket

Apple Backup 3.1:

Comes with dotmac account costing £60 for a one year subscription.  On the plus side it’s easy to use with QuickPicks for file selection and supports multiple versions of files.

However, it’s not suitable for restoring an entire disk to a bootable state as it doesn’t always store information such as file ownership and permissions properly.

Intego Personal Backup X4:

Well respected backup, restore, clone, synchronise and archive tool.  Offers good network support; direct recording to optical discs via a nice clean user interface.  However, X4 is let down by limited synchronisation features and poor restoration capabilities. Costs around £50 from Intego’s online store.

Prosoft Data Backup 2.1:

Offers backup, versioned backups, bootable backups and restore.  Good for beginners and power users with a wide selection of backup options, incremental backups and flexible scheduling.  On the downside, there is no support for optical media and poor synchronisation features. Costs around £40 from Amazon. For more information see the Prosoft engineering.

Retrospect Desktop 6.1:

Aimed at advanced users and network administrators – it can perform immediate, unscheduled backup, duplication, and restore functions.  Also backs up multiple computers and has good support for optical media like CD and DVD. 

However, Retrospect suffers from a complicated user interface, and beginners may struggle with having to write scripts for scheduled backups.  It’s also slow and hogs system resources during intensive operation.  Costs around £70 from Cancom UK, a free trial version is also available. For more information see EMC Insignia.

BounceBack Pro 7.1:

On the plus side, BounceBack offers easy duplication and restoration.  However, it suffers from a confusing interface, and offers limited support for password protection, and no support for backup to optical disk, such as CD or DVD. Costs around £40 boxed or £35 download. For more information see CMS Products.

Tri-BACKUP 4:

Offers standard backup, restore and synchronization features, with a wide range of back-up options and flexible scheduling.  However, Tri-Backup is let down by a confusing interface and offers only limited support for optical media- like CD and DVD. Costs around £25 and a trial mode for 30 days is also available. For more information see Tri-Edre.

Roxio Toast 8:

For backing up to optical media, Toast has been the standard Mac utility for many years.  Toast is easy to use and understand with a simple user interface, and supports burning files to CD, DVD or even ISOs readable by Mac and Windows computers.  Also supports the new Blu-ray DVD format. Costs around £60 from Amazon. For more information see Roxio.

Data Recovery software

Unlike the other software reviewed here, Alsoft’s Disk Warrior is the only package that will recover and rebuild data from a corrupted hard disk to an external hard disk.  We’ve personally used Disk Warrior to recover data from an apparently dead Mac to an iPod and then back to a newly installed hard disk.

Disk Warrior:

Data recovery tool that no Mac user should be without.  Costs around £60 from Amazon. For more information see alsoft.

More prevention – routine maintenance

Routine maintenance of the Mac – such as defragmenting the hard disk and repairing file permissions – can help keep your Mac running smoothly and nip problems in the bud.

Apple’s Disk Utility will verify and repair file permission problems, and even restore data you backed up to an external hard disk.

Click to view larger image of Disk Utility

There are a number of utilities to optimise and repair your system, and perform numerous routine maintenance operations with the click of a button, such as Cocktail (costs around £10), MacPilot (costs around £10) or the free Onyx utility.

Click to view larger image of Macpilot

We’ve also had personal experience of Micromat’s Techtool Pro (costs around £80 from Amazon).  To be clear this is a disk maintenance tool, not a data recovery tool.  Techtool is useful for fixing permissions and defragging the hard disk – but there are plenty of cheaper tools such as Cocktail, MacPilot and Onyx.

What to back-up to

For those without the comfort blanket of fileservers backing up to tape every night, there are several choices for backing up your Mac’s precious data.

As always, ask yourself how much data and how often you’re planning to back-up, as this will influence your choice of back-up device.  We’ve also written a longer Knowledgebase article Backing Up Your Data on back-up devices and strategies.

Optical media back-ups:

Optical media – such as DVD and CD - have become astonishingly cheap and are great for the long-term archiving of work.  However, DVDs and CDs are not suitable for regular backups as the process is time consuming and discs do not always burn correctly and become unreadable if scratched.  Also bear in mind, that apart from Roxio Toast, not many of the packages reviewed here support backup to optical media.

External had disk devices

These devices are great for quickly backing-up large of amounts data on a regularly basis and external hard disks are now so cheap that £150 will buy 400GB of storage.  Most external hard disks are portable enough to be taken off-site if necessary.  However, if you want to share an external hard disk across your network, the computer it is attached too will have to be ‘always on’.  Not good if you are concerned with energy consumption and electricity bills.

Network Attached Storage (NAS):

NAS devices are a great option for small office or home office set up for around £95 of your hard-earned cash will now buy a 160GB NAS device that connects to the Ethernet port of your router or hub, and allows you to share files, USB printers and backup data to everyone on the network. NAS devices are also light on power consumption and unlike external hard disk don’t need a computer to be ‘always on’ to work.

For more information see the Knowledgebase article Network Attached Storage.

*note that prices are correct at the date of publication