Check out Syncback if you haven’t already.

Being the father of a five-year-old who has been digitally documented (god, that sounds impersonal! But it ain’t), I’m darn happy to hear you’re getting your important stuff (personal and business alike) back.

What we do here at the house is three-part. First, the wife has a spacious hard drive which gets used, a lot. Second, she runs some level of networked off-site backup every night. (I don’t know the details, but I think it’s a pretty typical schedule, with a full backup every other week.) Third, for both family stuff and final copies of important work, she burns discs and takes them to her conveniently nearby parents, who stick those discs in their fire-proof safe. The hardest part, I think, was getting her application configurations to back up–all else was easy.

Okay, being born to parents who owned their own safe helped.

Give the family backup strategy a try. I can almost guarantee you know someone who Must! Have! All! Those! Pictures!

Jungle Disk just released a new version for Linux, Mac and Windows that offers a big improvement in speed and usability over the old version. Jungle Disk doesn’t cost the earth and if you pay a little extra you get incremental backup and web browser access to your backed up files.

A little time setting it up (understanding what you really need to back up) will reward you with a regular and efficient backup. I backup to a second hard drive daily and weekly to Jungle Disk. I’ve been through the lost photos saga and I don’t want to go through it again.

Look, you seem to be an intelligent and savvy person -why couldn’t you spend 30 seconds or so on a search-engine query which would’ve revealed to you the easiest and most cost-effective way of backing up your Mac, SuperDuper plus an external FireWire drive? It would take between 15 and 45 minutes to do an update every couple of nights while you slept.

There’s just no excuse for this kind of sloppiness. I’m sorry that you had to go through this personal disaster, but it was 100% avoidable, and, no, it doesn’t take a technophile to figure out how to back up a Mac. No Leopard, no Time Machine required, either.

At least you seem to’ve been shocked out of complacency, and are taking steps to ensure this can’t happen again – or are you? It sounds as if you’re making no provisions whatsoever for offsite backups, so what happens if you have a fire at your house or some other kind of extreme event and both your MacBook *and* your local backup drive end up being destroyed? Make a rotation with your hard drives and put one of them in a safety deposit box somewhere, or investigate one of the numerous online data backup services (ensure your data is encrypted before you back it up, and that it remains encrypted on your backup drives and when hosted at the backup site).

It works at such a low level that it is file system agnostic.

I am using several drives that were not bootable but after running SpinRite against them they were bootable again. I also use it once a year as a maintenance tool.

I do not work for Gibson Research. I am just a happy user of their product.

The point I was trying to make with my last comment was that everyone should, at the very least, be utilizing Time Machine.

And no, I don’t work for Apple :-)

With Time Machine built in into Mac OS X Leopard, there is really no reason why you shouldn’t be backing up. You don’t even need to by a Time Capsule. Any external hard disk capable of connecting (and being detected) by OS X, would have worked for you.

Time Machine really is the killer feature of Leopard and everyone should be using it.

The reason I’m now backing up is because although Macs are just fantastic, they are still computers and are not infallible.

I now have a firewire-powered pocket-sized hard-drive and I connect it to my Mac about once a day to ensure everything is backed up. time Machine recognises it as the designated drive and back s up any changes made that day.

Today I also purchased Email Backup Pro. Every day it backs up and highly compresses all my email accounts and saves it to my iDisk which syncs with .Mac regularly.

I also have an Automator Workflow which copies/replaces key files onto my iDisk and this is part of start up items so thy back up every time I start up.

So in the event that both my Mac and my firewire hard drive fail or get stolen, I will at the very least have my most important work and emails ready.

.Mac also syncs Address Book, bookmarks, keychain, email accounts and various other elements. That’s three daily backups of my email!!!

The next stage in my back up plan is to move some of my older non-sensitive documents to an online service such as Google Docs, Zoho Office or maybe just into storage using http://www.Box.net or http://www.drop.io

What do you think?

I use SuperDuper to back up my Mac – very easy and quick.