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.