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Backup media - selection and preparation for backups

 

There are many possibilities for storing your backup copies. Usually it is a sensible to back up files to an external location where they are safe if anything should happen to your hard drive and you lose your original files. This could be an external hard drive, a flash drive, or any other external storage device. I have several external drives on which I keep clones of my system and daily incremental backups of my Home folder which includes all my personal files.

Different backup devices could be...

  1. A good quality external hard drive. They are cheap these days and you should get one at least big enough to hold your whole system and more. You can also partition an external drive for different uses, a daily home folder backup, a system clone, and more. I have always used OWC brand drives and find them very reliable. There are plenty of reviews online about different makes and models. SSD (solid state drives) have come way down in price and have no moving parts to get damaged if you drop them - they are way faster than regular disk type drives
  2. An NAS type external drive. These are Network assisted devices and not Mac File Systems- they have become quite popular and work well in most cases but they do not preserve all the OS X file metadata and some are not that compatible with
  3. Remote backups. BackupList+ does not support remote backups over the internet at this time - though I have guided people through the steps to set them up. You can backup wirelessly via an Aiport Express router with disk attached or other wireless/disk setups.


Preparing a volume, external drive or partition for backups.

You should always format your drive before using it. Open Disk Utility which is found in your Applications > Utilities folder. Select the drive in the left column.

Click the erase tab at top of Disk Utility window and then select Format > "Mac OS Extended (journaled)"

You can name the disk whatever you wish

Press the "erase" button and you will be prompted to select "erase" again (safety precaution) and the disk will be erased and formatted.

One more important thing to do:

Click on the volume/disk icon in the finder and select Get Info from the Finder Menu at top of your screen (or Control-click on icon and select "Get Info") At bottom of Get Info window open Sharing and Permissions tab and be sure that the box "Ignore ownership..." is unchecked. If it is checked > click the lock icon - you will be asked for your admin password - and then un-check this box!

Rsync and backupList+ will not function correctly if that box is checked!