Be Safe, Clone Your Hard Drive
Derek has written a thorough tutorial showing Mac users the basics of cloning their hard drive. With an effective hard drive clone, if your primary drive ever goes down you can just boot from your clone, whether it be a second internal hard drive in your Mac Pro or an external Firewire drive. He also covers the software that can make it all happen.
What’s your backup solution Paul? How are you set-up against data loss?
Isn’t some kind of parity disk and an array of data disks a better solution than brute duplication?
At the moment, I’m not. But I recently backed up my iTunes music via the built-in disc backup thing however that didn’t backup playlists for me so I just backed up the entire directory to an external hard drive. I made ISO’s of all my main applications and have them on an external hard drive if I should ever need to reformat and reinstall them. For my site, I have tons of backups… daily SQL dumps, frequent theme backups and entire server backups.
I could lose everything on my computer and I’d only miss the music. Everything else I can download again. Things I purchase, I keep the serials in my gmail so I can just search for them and download the app again.. things like SubEthaEdit, AppZapper, Transmit and the such.
As for my bookmarks, I keep all those “random” links on del.icio.us and my browser only has the essential 25 or so.
Yes, Elliott that would be the best way, not necessarily the easiest way. :-P Setting up a parity disk on for example an external hard drive to use on your iMac will be a bit of a challenge for most users. If you can explain it easily though, I’d love to see a kickass tutorial.
How about an article on cloning your hard drive for Windows?
I was thinking about this this week actually!
But now I’m on a windows, and as Montoya asked, you can backup an windows partition using linux. I don’t remember how , but you can google and find!
The PowerQuest Drive Image does it for windows.