Some quick notes on backup strategy
Having a backup strategy is essential for every Mac OS X user. When issues arise due to disk corruption, a problematic incremental Mac OS X or Security update, or other unforeseen factors, having access to vital documents and applications is essential.
There are essentially two practical strategies for backup: Cloning your Mac OS X startup disk to an external volume, providing a bootable drive that is virtually identical to your current set-up; or simply duplicating your Home user folder to another volume or an online repository then relying on other methods for restoring your applications and various settings.
Option #1: Cloning your Mac OS X startup disk
Cloning your current Mac OS X startup volume to an external FireWire drive or another bootable disk is a superb option for backup, because it provides an instantaneous solution for getting things up and running in the case of drive failure or system inoperability.
There are a number of freeware and shareware utilities that offer this functionality. Among the best are:
Super Duper offers the useful capability of "checkpointing" your system. Essentially, this means that you can run off your bootable, (almost) cloned backup, while preserving the user documents and other information on your current startup volume. Providing your original startup drive is not completely inaccessible, this will allow you to have access to information that has changed since your last backup.
Before using one of these cloning utilities, make sure that the destination disk is formatted (erased) with Apple's Disk Utility. This helps to ensure that no pre-existing disk conditions affect the new installation.
In fact, you can use Disk Utility itself to perform a disk clone if you are using Mac OS X 10.4.x. Simply select the "Restore" option, then drag your current Mac OS X startup volume into the appropriate field.
This option does not provide some of the advanced features available through Carbon Copy Cloner and SuperDuper, but is free, relatively quick and straightforward.
Option #2: Backing up your home user folder
Simply backing up your home folder is a much faster process than cloning your entire drive, and may be more desirable in some ways than the former option.
One advantage of using this method is that if your previous Mac OS X installation had significant issues caused by corruption of certain files, they will likely be resolved when you are forced to install a clean copy of Mac OS X on the original drive, or a new one.
Duplicating your user folder (/Users/username) will backup most of your important personalized information, including bookmarks for most browsers, Mail.app e-mails, iTunes music, your Desktop folder, and other system settings.
Using this method will, however, result in the loss of various system add-ons, such as contextual menus and additional Preference panes, some user-added fonts and more.
A drawback, and a significant time drain associated with this method is the re-installation of applications, which will all be lost the fresh Mac OS X install process.
You will have to re-install applications from their original media or online source. It is also essential that you retain any serial numbers or other registration information required for re-authorization after the restoration takes place.
Another point of consideration involves updating of the installed applications. Downloading updates for each installed application can be a time consuming process. In order to avoid this process, you can keep archives of updater packages stored on the same repository where your backed up home user folder resides. This includes the most recent Mac OS X combination updater, available from Apple's Software download page.
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