In article <290720081011083345%jimsgibson@gmail.com>, Jim Gibson <jimsgibson@gmail.com> wrote:
> > If you purchase an external firewire drive from a Mac-oriented vendor, > such as <http://www.macsales.com>, it will come already formatted for > Mac use. > > For backup software, I would recommend Super Duper! or Carbon Copy > Cloner. >
Yes!
1) Buy one, or even two, small "bus-powered" FireWire "pocket drives", maybe 80 GB each, unless your internal drive is bigger than that. ("Bus-powered" means no separate "power supply brick" is needed; these little drives are powered directly from your computer through the FireWire cable -- very handy! "Pocket drives" means they're the size of a small paperback book and can be easily moved around or put in a drawer.)
2) Get a copy of SuperDuper!; do an initial full backup of your machine to each of the external drives you have (may take an hour or so).
3) Also create a "settings" file for each of these backups ("settings file" is defined in SuperDuper!), then put an alias for each settings file in a "Backups" folder (or any name you like) somewhere convenient on your desktop or wherever.
3) From then on make an "incremental backup" each evening or so, depending on how much new stuff you put on your machine each day; this will likely take 5 or 10 minutes at most. If you have two backup drives; do incremental backups to one of them for a a week or two, then switch to the other. That way, you always have a backup from yesterday, and one from a week or so back, just in case. (Some people keep the older backup somewhere else, off premises, just in case their house burns down.) (And note: These are "backups", NOT archives; if you delete a file from your computer HD, the next incremental backup removes that file from the backup drive also.)
4) As someone who's slow and cautious about system upgrades, I'd say, do upgrade to Tiger, in whatever sequence of steps is needed to move up to 10.4.11. No objections to moving on to Leopard if you wish, but I do recall a lot of improvement from 10.3 to 10.4, and I'm still happy with 10.4.
