Quick Backups Without Specialized Software

May 15, 2006 - 12:07am

pentalive asks:

Question

What is a good freeware program to backup my iBook to cd-rw? (up to and including making a “disaster recovery” cd)

Thanks.

Answer

People totally ignore the Finder for simple tasks like this, and it’s kind of sad. Tiger brought a revolution for free backups to the desktop and no one takes advantage of it. There’s two ways to do this, and it depends on how much data you have to backup as to which way you want to go.

Burn Folders

Make a burn folder! Not kidding, do it now. Once you start using this you’ll see what a great solution this is for backups. Make a burn folder on your desktop and drag in some things you want to regularly backup, like your Quicken Data or some projects you’re working on or something. When you feel the need to make a backup, open up the folder and click on burn. The Finder will make the backup for you, right there. No selections or nasty programs or nagware. If you know what you need to backup, that’s how you do it easily and free.

Smart Folders

Don’t know what to backup? Make a Smart Folder on your desktop and tell it to search your Documents folder for items changed in the period between now and your last backup. Drag those to a CD you’ve put in and burn it. Do this weekly, or monthly. Hell, I’d do it daily to an iDisk or other network drive and then do it weekly or monthly to CD/DVD as well.

Backing up is as simple as copying a file. You don’t need a backup program or these complicated incremental/differential/complete backup schemes or over-complicated file selectors and timed processes and all of this crap just to make copies of your files. Mac OS X does it for you.

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Adam Knight is one of the founders of Mac Geekery and is a geek at heart. Programmer by day, hacker by night, his daily life revolves around the Macintosh platform, which he has been a user and programmer for since the early days of System 7 when his LCII replaced his Apple //c.

In-between tech jobs, he’s managed to learn the basics of any web hacker: PHP, MySQL, Perl, Apache, Linux, *BSD, and the intricacies of ./configure —prefix=~/bombshelter/. Today, codepoet is concentrating on blogging again, writing some software for the Mac by himself (including Notae) and for his company (such as Photonic) and has a few other toys coming out soon.

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May 15, 2006 - 7:55am

Cygniapolis said

To make backups onto both CDs (and/or an external drive) while having greater security than burning directly to CD, (unless you destroy them each time a new one is made,) you can create a blank disk image using Disk Utility that’s the same size as a CD, and choose the encryption option to assign it a password. Then burn that CD-sized image onto your CD (and/or drag it into your external drive or iPod or what have you.) This ensures that no one can access your files by stealing the CD or iPod.

May 15, 2006 - 11:54am

n8gray said

While these are good suggestions, I don’t know if they’re really what the person was asking for. It sounds like he wants the ability to back up his entire system, not just a few files, and he wants to be able to have a bootable backup. I would recommend using Carbon Copy Cloner to back up to an external FireWire drive. You can then boot from that drive if need be. Just make sure to read the FAQs in the CCC forums to make sure you don’t end up doing something wrong, and be prepared — it’s not as simple as it should be, sadly.

May 15, 2006 - 11:59am

Adam Knight said

Which also doesn’t answer the question of burning it to CD.

My point is that while everyone wants a backup program, you don’t need a backup program. You’re just copying files.

May 15, 2006 - 3:40pm

murphycoverdot2001 said

Given that the original question was about burning to a CD, and further given that there is no way in hell to back up everything on a CD (even a CD-RW), I think the advice given was excellent.

Except for the part about making it a disaster recovery (=bootable?) CD which really wasn’t answered, possibly because there is no answer. On a DVD, maybe. A CD can barely fit the System files and some apps…

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