Best Backup Software

I am going to be using my new iMac purely for photography.

At the moment I have all my photos on an external drive (not on the Mac hard drive) and on disc. One of my friends has suggested that I backup my external drive to my mac's hard drive as it will compress it and will only take up minimal space.

Does anyone have any suggestions for this kind of backup software?

Thanks

LisaR1976 said:

I am going to be using my new iMac purely for photography.

At the moment I have all my photos on an external drive (not on the
Mac hard drive) and on disc. One of my friends has suggested that
I backup my external drive to my mac's hard drive as it will
compress it and will only take up minimal space.

Does anyone have any suggestions for this kind of backup software?

Thanks

Click to expand...

Lisa,

I think the backup strategy depends on how many GB of photos you have. I would probably not suggest replicating these photos to your internal drive, but buy another external drive as a backup. You can get lots of storage for cheap these days...

For software, my favorite to clone a drive is SuperDuper.

--
Jim

Most of my folders are around 5 - 7 gb each, possibly more so like you say i don't want to back up to my internal drive.

I will have a look at another drive and also the software.

Thanks

I would also recommend the suggest of external HDD for large, dynamic data. SuperDuper!® is an excellent solution for providing bootable copies of HDD. Though for simple backup of a folder like this situation is not required. Can't go with the aforementioned combo.

Regarding compressing images and storing on the HDD. Keep in mind that .jpg images are already compressed to varying degrees. So, further compression wit .zip, etc. may not provide impressive results. Moreover you won't be able to browse the back-up copy without first decompressing.

In short go with a HDD: 250GB to 500GB seems to be sweet-spot for price per GB.

Trey

I use SuperDuper to back up to 2 separate externals (one of which is stored off site) and I also then back up files to DVD or CD. My daughter works in a computer store and sees failed internal as well as external hard drives every day. The cost of data recovery from a failed hard drive is enormous so the more back ups, the better. It doesn't take much time in the grand scheme of things and is invaluable when you need it... chas
--
chas... PBase supporter... Canon PowerShot SD550, Canon EOS 30D

Ditto.

The other shareware utility (Carbon Copy Cloner) is beta for Intel Macs.

if you have space on your mac store the photos in a photoarchive directory on the mac.

Get 2 external HDs and use Superduper to backup entire mac HD to each external bootable drive. Keep one drive offsite at work or other location and update it every couple of weeks.

If you have a large archive of photos which won't fit on the mac internal HD I would still get Superduper and backup internal mac HD to a bootable external.

Then I would duplicate your external photo archive drive by backing it up to another external drive.

External drives are cheap...losing photos to HD failures is priceless!

--
http://www.pbase.com/pwh