Backup Your Mac Completly

I have been running my same system without issues for more then three years (knock on wood) but I can't help but think of all those times prior to owning my mac that I had a Blue Screen of Death on my Windows PC that I couldn't recover from that forced me to reload. Backup programs on Windows PC's would normally consist of a program that you would have to configure to "copy" the files that you select as important over to an external drive. You then would have to reload your Windows machine, go through the pain of waiting for all the Microsoft updates to come down and install and then reload all your software and possibly even re-configure your preferences. This would easily consume the most part of a day.

With a mac it is sooo much easier when you use a program called SuperDuper! The crazy part is, its free unless you want the scheduling. I suggest paying for the product to support such a great product.

Here is what you need to do to give you some peace of mind. Ensure you have an external drive that has at least the same size as your internal drive. So if you have a 200GB internal Hard Drive, make sure your external drive is at least 200GB.

Next, download SuperDuper from Shirt Pocket's website and install. Then run SuperDuper from your Mac.

Click on Options to select your Options

Once you click Ok on the Options Screen and then click Copy Now on the main screen the copy will begin. Note Step 3 in the screenshot below. It says Make MBProBackup (name of the external partition/drive) bootable. This means that once SuperDuper completes, you will be able to boot off your external drive and run your Mac just like it was your internal drive. No difference.

If your harddrive ever failed or you had a need to restore from your backup all you need to do is.

Make sure your external drive with your backup is plugged into your mac.

Power on your mac and begin pressing the option key

You'll get prompted on which device you would like to boot from. Select your external drive "in this example it would be MBProBackup"

Once selected the mac will be running completely off your external drive. Once up you run SuperDuper and copy from External drive (MBProBackup) to Macintosh HD which would completly restore your mac.

Another great feature of SuperDuper is that you have access to your files in the backup. So if you wanted to restore just one file, well connect your external hard drive and browse to the location your file is in and copy it over. Many other backup programs put the backup in one file making it impossible to get to your files.