I was just wondering, how do you guys backup your Mac(s)? Do you just copy the Home folders to an external harddrive, or mirror the whole thing including the Apps and OS, or... maybe use the Backup utility from Apple? And do you just backup what has changed since your last backup or do you overwrite the previous ones?

Thanks for sharing.

I only backup the necessary stuffs, keychains, address book, browser bookmarks, calendar, mail, preferences, personal files & work files etc.

I just set all of them in an Automator application, copying all the necessary folders into one single folder. Then copy it to my external drive.

I backup the WHOLE drive using SuperDuper.

(Actually the programme is called "SuperDuper!" with an exclaimation mark. However writing it out that way looked a little funny....)

I used to backup only my "home" folder to DVD. Unfortunately this folder has grown so large that it would require a rather tall stack of DVDs. So now I use a FireWire 800 160Gb harddrive to backup my MBP. When the data on my MBP passes the 160GB mark, I guess I'll have to buy a bigger backup drive.

This strategy was useful when I recently reinstalled my Adobe CS3 apps. To my horror; Adobe requires that you use an "uninstall" utility located in the Utilities folder. Since I had already dragged my apps to the AppZapper and emptied the trash; I could not reinstall the CS3 apps. The Adobe installer insisted that the CS3 apps were still installed. Reverting from my backup meant I did not have to reinstall the whole disk...

Haha I backup the whole drive to a firewire drive too. But it's kiling me that I have to copy 150GB of stuff to an external drive every fortnight or so cuz I can't pinpoint exactly what has changed since the last backup. Gee I hate this.

Is Leopard gonna be smarter?

Get SuperDuper!

It's worth the money.