The Best Backup Method
Whatever it is you do, you need to backup your data. Until recently, there was no easy way to do this on the Mac - without having to buy third party software that backed up on a schedule. Luckily, Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) has something called Time Machine built-in. Time Machine backs up everything on your hard drive hourly, so that you can “go back in time” and recover files that you may have mistakenly deleted. This works great, but takes up a lot of space. I have Time Machine backing up my MacBook to a Western Digital My Book Studio Edition - a 500GB FireWire drive.
For Windows users, Vista offers some backup facilities, but not anywhere near as intricate as the Mac’s. However, Windows users do have a vast choice of third party applications for backups.
But most of us only backup internally, to a drive connected locally to your computer. What if your house were to burn down? Your data would go with it. Fortunately, there are some solutions out there. Online backups are becoming better all the time . Mozy is supposedly a great service for doing just that, as is a free alternative, DropBox.
But online backups have one major downside for most of us: Speed. Even with today’s fastest broadband, upload speeds vary from 256kbps to 1mbps. Until fiber optic broadband with the same up-speed as down arrives, online backups aren’t going to be efficient for files over 100mb.
I haven’t really answered the question, “What is the best backup method”. There simply isn’t one right now. I would back up as much as possible, where possible - but keep it safe.