I have been meaning to setup automatic backups for my Mac to make sure that I don't lose the thousands of pictures, songs and important documents that I have stored on the hard drive. My router has recently died and looking into the Apple Extreme Base Station I see that it now has Airport Disk as a feature to attach an external hard drive that is accesible over the network. Are any of the Home Tech users using this as a file backup solution? Other suggestions for automatic backup?
Thanks,
Tyler
the new version of the os has this thing called time machine which, when coupled with a firewire drive, is supposed to make backing up and recovering files ridiculously easy.
view newdad's profile
Joeq is talking about Leopard, which i'm sure i'll one day upgrade with. in the meantime, i'll continue to back up files onto writeable cds. memorex makes a high-volume-friendly one. its name and specs are: memorex cd-rw, rewritable, 4x, 700mb, 80 min. i just backed up my whole photo library and some of my downloaded albums too. i have the latest macbook laptop (in case you're wondering).
view *heather leaf*'s profile
well, my macbook WAS the latest before Leopard came out on new machines last week. :-)
view *heather leaf*'s profile
I have the Airport Extreme and not only is it incredibly fast for wireless browsing (one of the few to support the 802.11n draft specification), the external disk is an absolute no-brainer. Get an external disk with USB 2.0, which usually run around $150 for a 500GB, and plug it into the back of the airport extreme. Voila, it is accessible from any computer connected to the network, although with Windows you'll need to do a "Mount network drive" etc.
Also, this is future-proof, since if you eventually upgrade to Leopard, the Time Machine feature integrates with Airport Extreme disks seamlessly.
view briankoenig's profile
Hey Brian,
Looks like time machine and aiport disk working together has been nixed for now:
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/07/10/26/apple_yanks_wireless_backup_from_leopard_last_minute.html
view jamie pup's profile
If you want the easiest backup ever, just sign up for Mozy (www.mozy.com). It's automatic backup to a secure remote server. You can get a 2GB account for free, or get an unlimited account for $5 per computer.
I've been using Mozy for a while now and it's wonderful. I plan on getting Leopard and setting up a backup server as well. I'll store the heavy files like music, movies, photos locally and the light stuff like email, docs, etc. on Mozy.
For the price of one nice external hard drive you can get about two years of unlimited Mozy.
view Max's profile
wow, you guys - your tips helped ME so much! i feel like i'm still in the stone ages now.
view *heather leaf*'s profile
Oh my gosh! I can't believe they took that out last-minute. That was one of the reasons I was going to upgrade :(.
view briankoenig's profile
Well hopefully it will come soon in an update.
BTW, in your current set up you can still copy the files over manually and wirelessly can't you?
view jamie pup's profile