DesignRegeneration Blog

Backing up locally to an external hard drive is an excellent first step to safeguarding your data. Time Machine on OS X Leopard is really easy to setup and use. When you first plug in an external drive your Mac will prompt you to start backing up to it.

The next step is to start backing up your data to an offsite location. Reasons for keeping a copy of your data at another location include fire, natural disasters and theft. If this sounds unnecessary, consider the following:

• If your Mac is stolen, are the thieves really going to be considerate enough to leave your external hard drive behind?
• Your home insurance policy may cover your Mac in case of flooding, but what if both your computer and external hard drive are waterlogged?
• Also consider that it is affordable and easy to back up your data using an internet based service.

Mozy and Jungle Disk are both good options. Jungle Disk offers flexible pricing using Amazon’s S3 service, but if you are backing up more than 30 GB then Mozy may be cheaper. Expect to pay about $50 a year. Crashplan is an alternative, backing up your data over the internet to a work or friend’s computer. Carbonite is another service to keep an eye on; the Mac version is currently in beta.

If you have multiple user accounts on your Mac, Time Machine will back them all up. However, the internet backup application may not be able to do this as easily due to file permissions. This is something to consider when evaluating backup services.