Backup for Mac and PC
Contents
- 1 Backup for Mac and PC
- 9 Taking away your school Google Account documents (seoulforeign.com) (important if you are leaving)
Safely back up your files Upload and store files from any folder on your computer, camera and SD cards in the cloud. You can find your content on any phone, tablet or computer using Google Drive. Simplify PC and Mac backup Automatically sync folders on your computer to the cloud. Back up folders like your Desktop, Documents, and Downloads directly into your Dropbox.
Backup: Which Files to backup? - Mac
(These instructions are for MacBook Pro running Mountain Lion or older. They should be similar of Mavericks)
You probably want to backup these files.
- documents
- movies
- music
- pictures
- files saved on your desktop
On Mac you can find folders for all of those files in your 'Home' folder - in Finder choose Go > Home.
NOTE: iMovie, iTunes and iPhoto also keep their files in these folders.
Backup: Which Files to backup? -Windows 8
Now simply called Documents, this folder is a convenient location for storing all of your documents, such as text files, spreadsheets, and presentations. Like My Documents, Documents is available on the Start menu, and you can also create a shortcut to it on the desktop for faster access. In addition, new searching and organizing tools, such as the Navigation pane and the Search box, are available to help you rapidly locate files.
Unlike the old My Documents folder, Documents does not contain folders for pictures and music. Those folders are now stored outside of Documents and are also available on the Start menu.
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-vista/what-happened-to-my-documents
Backing Up Web Bookmarks (important if you are leaving or are getting a new computer)
Most browsers allow you to synchronize bookmarks across many devices (including phones and tablets) - this is an easy way to backup your bookmarks. These videos show how to set this up.
- Internet Explorer (only in Windows 8)
NOTE: If you use Internet Explorer in Windows 7 or below you can use a simple trick to synchronize bookmarks across many computers.
You can also copy your bookmarks to a different browser.
- Google Chrome: menu > Bookmarks > Import Bookmarks and Settings
- Firefox: Bookmarks > Show All Bookmarks > Import and Backup > Import Data from Another Browser
- Safari: automatically copies bookmarks when you first run Safari - see these instructions
Here are some options for backing up your files.
All of these methods can be used to transfer your files to a new computer.
Backing Up Options: #1: Use the 'cloud' (important if you are getting a new computer)
You can save your files in a 'cloud' service such as Google Drive.
With Google Drive you can:
- install the Google Drive program which automatically synchronizes a folder on your computer to the 'cloud'
- store and edit any type of file - not just Google Docs (5GB free)
- access your files from a phone or tablet
- access your files offline
- share files with other people
- organise photos with Picasa
If your computer stops working your files are saved in the 'cloud'.
Similar services are:
- DropBox (starts with 2GB free)
- Box (5GB free)
- SkyDrive (7GB free)
- SugarSync (5GB free)
- iCloud (5GB free)
Backing Up Options: #2 (for teachers): Use your SFS network drive (important if you are getting a new computer)
You can save your files on your SFS network drive (also known as your 'U' drive).
Your files are automatically backed up, but you can only access them at school.
Instructions for connecting to your network drive are on our tech tips page under MACBOOK PRO > Connect to Network Drives.
If your computer stops working your files are saved on your SFS network drive.
Backing Up Options: #3: Use an external drive (important if you are leaving or are getting a new computer)
Buy a USB flash drive or a portable hard drive - the SFS Spirit Shop sells USB flash drives and the stationery shop at the bottom of the SFS hill sells portable hard drives.
If you want to use the drive on both Mac and Windows make sure it's 'FAT32' format - watch this 1 minute video to find out how.
You can regularly (e.g. weekly) copy your files to the external drive.
Each time you make a new backup you can delete the old one.
If your computer stops working your files are saved on the external hard drive.
Backing Up Options: #4: Use Mac Time Machine or Windows Backup and Restore.
Mac Time Machine (important if you are getting a new computer)
Time Machine is a Mac program which automatically keeps backups of your entire computer on an external drive. It keeps hourly backups for the past 24 hours, daily backups for the past month, and weekly backups until your external drive is full.
If your computer stops working your files are saved on the external hard drive.
Watch this 3 minute video to find out how to use Time Machine.
Windows Backup and Restore (important if you are getting a new computer)
You can use File History to back up the files on your PC in the Documents, Music, Pictures, Videos, and Desktop folders and theOneDrive files available offline on your PC. Over time, File History builds a history of your files. You'll first need to set up a File History drive and turn File History on. For more info, see Set up a drive for File History. If your original files are lost, damaged, or deleted, you can restore them. You can also browse and restore different versions of your files. For more info, see Restore files or folders using File History.
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-8/what-happened-to-backup-restore
Taking away your school Google Account documents (seoulforeign.com) (important if you are leaving)
If you have been using the Drive app downloaded to your computer you will have a copy of all your Google files locally. The non Google documents will be in their original formats (if you did not convert them) but the Google
documents will be in a format that you won’t be able to take away easily. You will need to follow the Google Takeout process explained below.
Method 1: Share the documents with another Google account outside the seoulforeign domain
You can share any of your Google documents with another Google account such as a personal account. Just go to the share options and add the gmail address (make sure that it has edit permissions).
To be on the safe side, go into your other Gmail account and make a copy of the document. This means that when your school account is deleted you will not lose the file.
Backup Drive Format For Mac And Pc
Any mail you want to keep can be forwarded to the other address.
Method 2: Use Google Takeout
Google provides a service that allows you to download all your Google content using Google Takeout. This link will take you to Google Takeout. The site explains what this service will do and which Google apps it can deal with.
It is important to note that it isn’t perfect. Documents are converted to another format (MicroSoft, Open document and pdf formats) and lose all sharing permissions.
You can download email but it involves third party mail clients to load the emails into other mail accounts. You maybe interested in this PC World article on Google Takeout
Other Tips
If you have lost files which you did not back up you could try some of these suggestions.
- If you recently deleted files you can probably recover them with software like Disk Drill (Mac) or Recuva (Windows).
- If your computer won't start at all you might be able to get files from it with Target Mode (Mac) or by starting it with an Ubuntu LiveCD (Windows).
- If all else fails a computer repair shop may be able to recover your files.
There is a computer repair shop in Yonhi Dong at the Wooribank intersection where you can get help. The technician speaks good English.
Setting up a backup is probably on your to-do list. So why haven’t you done it yet? Maybe it’s because you’ve got a million other things to do, or maybe the technical aspects are a little daunting. A backup may seem like just another mundane task in your long list of to-dos, but a day will inevitably come when your hard drive dies, when your laptop is stolen, or when your accounts get brutally hacked. Like death and taxes, there are no exceptions to this rule — it’s only a matter of time. This doesn’t mean you should live in fear of a digital catastrophe; instead, take this opportunity to create the backup that your future self so rightly deserves. It’s easier than you might think.
So, where to begin? The first thing you’ll need is some kind of storage device to house your digital belongings. There are a multitude of mediums at your disposal, from USB hard drives to the anachronistic DVD. External hard drives offer the best price per gigabyte ratio and can be purchased at nearly any electronics retailer. They make an excellent baseline, but you can add more storage and better reliability with more advanced systems like RAID enclosures and NAS drives, which we’ll get to later.
When my computer is working correctly, it’s hard to remember to do the routine maintenance that, deep down, I know I should. It’s not that PC maintenance isn’t on my to-do list, it’s just that there’s always something more pressing that needs my attention. There’s always work to do or a new app to try, and I think to myself: “my computer’s acting fine, I can clean my desktop and backup my files tomorrow.”
It’s hard to remember to do the routine maintenance that, deep down, I know I should
But that promise of “tomorrow” always gets pushed to the next day, then the next, leaving countless college papers, years of pictures, and personal information stranded on a single spinning platter. But is that really such a bad thing?
If you’ve never experienced catastrophic data loss, you might not be all that worried about it. However, if you ask someone who’s paid for expensive data recovery — nearly $1,700 in Mat Honan’s case — and they’ll likely tell you that setting up backup is well worth the time. And that's not to mention all the people who never got their data back.
With a backup plan securely stationed at the top of my list of weekend activities, I knew that I needed to set up a system with three qualities: set-and-forget automation, some element of security, and a pleasant and straightforward user interface.
There are a litany of backup options for Mac and PC users, some more complex than others, and each addresses a slightly different type of user. Some backup software is customizable to the n’th degree, while others focus solely on ease-of-use. With a daunting number of backup hardware and software combinations to consider, I decided to take on the hardware side first.
You can backup your data to just about anything — a spare internal drive, an external drive, and even the aging DVD. We’re going to start with a basic external drive — be it USB, FireWire, or Thunderbolt — because of their affordability and easy availability. From there we’ll move on to more redundant forms of storage that do come at a higher initial outlay, but will last far longer and keep your data safe over a period of many years.
Drives either fail right away, or start to degrade after the second year mark
A single external drive is a good start for your first backup system, but not all external drives are created equal. Google did an extensive, five-year study on the failure rate of consumer hard drives and found that age has the most direct correlation with hard drive death — drives either fail right away, or start to degrade after the second year mark. The company’s study does allude to a disparity in quality between drive makers, but it doesn’t mention which manufacturers were better or worse, most likely as a professional courtesy to its suppliers.
There are also different kinds of external drives to consider. Portable external drives that use laptop hard drives are designed to be carried around with you, and make great, long-lasting backup drives if you don’t need tons of space. External drives that use 3.5-inch desktop drives offer more storage for less money, but they shouldn’t be carried with you — they’re not built to withstand strong vibrations, or worse, being dropped. For desktop users, a more capacious external drive based on 3.5-inch disks comes in particularly handy for frequent backups, especially those that track multiple file versions.
So what’s the best choice for backup hardware? Realistically, your budget will determine what’s right for you, but we recommend buying for quality rather than capacity, since you can always add more later. Western Digital or Seagate are current market leaders — they have brand names to protect, and even their cheapest hard drives are solid choices — but recent consolidations in the industry have leveled the playing field to a certain degree.
If you’ve got a Mac, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a better value than Apple’s Time Machine software included with OS X since version 10.5. All you’ve got to do is tell it which drive to use, enable encryption (on Lion and later), and bam, you’re set. Time Machine is both a full system backup, meaning you can use it to restore your system even if your entire hard drive fails, and an incremental backup that keeps track of older copies of files. There are other options, like SuperDuper! and Carbon Copy Cloner, but these are focused more on “system images” and don’t offer features like Time Machine’s slick UI or effortless automation.
Despite its strengths, Time Machine isn’t an infallible backup solution for Mac users — it doesn’t handle redundancy or customization very well. You can’t designate a custom backup interval (60 minutes is the hardcoded default) and it’s not easy to see what was recently backed up. In keeping with Apple’s long-running choice of form-over-function, Time Machine forgoes advanced options for approachability, but once it’s set up you can let it run and forget that it’s even there.
For Windows users, Microsoft’s built-in backup solutions leave a lot to be desired. It’s not obvious that Windows 7 even has a backup function, since it’s buried in the Control Panel, and different versions of Windows have different capabilities, adding to the confusion. Windows 8 remedies some of Windows 7’s backup woes, but its interface still lacks compared to Time Machine’s. While it is included free of charge, even Microsoft admits that only five percent of Windows customers make use of Windows Backup — a clear indication that the process is more convoluted than it should be.
That leaves the door wide open for third-party backup managers. CrashPlan’s free client has many of the qualities I was looking for: easy and straightforward automation, 128-bit encryption, and an aesthetically pleasing UI. While the interface is nothing to write home about, it’s very clear and even the advanced settings are organized in a logical and approachable way. One of the best features of CrashPlan’s free client is the ability to backup to another computer on your network — a potential boon to laptop users who want to keep their data safe but prefer not to tether their machines on a daily basis.
Notifications may seem trivial, but knowing when a drive has failed gives you a chance to fix the problem faster
If you’re willing to pay for what we consider be on of the most comprehensive Windows backup solutions, Genie Timeline Professional combines an intuitive, Windows 8-style interface with lots of customization options for those looking to get their hands dirty. Like Time Machine, Genie Timeline’s most alluring feature is a chronological view of backed up files (including previous versions), sorted into either the raw Windows folder structure, or categorizations of content. Genie Timeline also offers a system-level backup, but to restore your entire OS you’ll have to keep track of its bootable restoration disk. Genie Timeline Professional is one of the best Time Machine clones out there, but it costs a hefty $59.95 for a single license.
All of the aforementioned options will keep your data backed up, but both CrashPlan and Genie Timeline Professional offer a small but enticing feature — they’ll email or tweet at you when a backup happens or if something goes wrong. At first glance, notifications may seem like a trivial inclusion, but knowing when a drive has failed gives you a chance to fix the problem faster.
Using a single external drive will afford you peace of mind, but having only one backup isn’t a perfect solution, especially considering the results of Google’s hard drive study. Ideally you’d have a least one “onsite” backup to one or more hard drives in your home, plus one “offsite” backup to the cloud or any other secure location. Offsite backups were originally popularized in enterprise and small business environments so that a robbery, fire, or flood wouldn’t leave them computationally incapacitated, but storage prices have fallen so much in the last decade that even home users can get in on the action.
Storage prices have fallen so much that even home users can get in on the offsite action
Many people have chosen to keep their backups in the cloud. There are countless services that offer some allotment of space on their servers for a monthly fee, though you’d be wise to check their privacy policy before signing up. Apple’s iCloud offers 5GB of backup space for free for in addition to other services like calendar, picture, and contact syncing, making it an alluring option for Apple customers with multiple OS X and iOS devices. However, Honan’s experience aside, recent bouts of reliability problems make iCloud hard to recommend for pure backup purposes. That said, it’s still a good way to keep documents, calendars, and music synced across Apple devices as long as you’ve got a backup to fall back on.
CrashPlan+ Unlimited is another cloud option, one that’s both affordable and and feature-rich. It’s a $3.00-per-month upgrade to CrashPlan’s free client software and offers truly unlimited cloud storage. While it won’t keep your Apple devices synced, it can keep all of the computers in your home backed up to the cloud with almost no hassle. It offers enhanced 448-bit encryption, meaning that even if CrashPlan were to be hacked — a real concern in today’s online environment — you can rest assured that your personal data is safe. Together with a local backup, CrashPlan+ Unlimited is one of the best ways to keep your data as safe as it can possibly be.
The cloud may not be for you, though, if you like to maintain complete control of your data. There are only a handful of cloud backup services that support client-side encryption like CrashPlan+ Unlimited (where files are encrypted before being uploaded to their servers). Wikipedia has a convenient sortable list of cloud services (and don't miss our own comparison of cloud sync services), and we recommend checking it out if you like the idea of cloud storage but have reservations about security.
For those who prefer to keep their data local, there are many other ways to keep a redundant backup without pushing data up into the cloud, and one of the easiest and most affordable alternatives is to set up your own RAID storage. Visiting Wikipedia’s page explaining RAID can get technical in a hurry, so we’re only going to explore one implementation — RAID 1.
RAID 1 involves two hard drives — one that holds accessible data, and the other that serves as an identical mirror to that drive. While you only get half the space of both drives combined, you can rest assured that, even as your drives age become more likely to fail, you’ll have one duplicate copy. USB 3.0 and eSATA RAID 1 enclosures have become much more mainstream in the last decade, and can be had for around $150 dollars. That is a bit steep for a glorified external drive, but the cost still pales in comparison to commercial data recovery services which can easily cost $1,000 or more. It should be noted that Time Machine doesn’t support multiple backup drives, so a RAID 1 enclosure is a particularly alluring option for Mac users who value redundancy.
Another option, one often preferred by power users and computing enthusiasts, is to set up what’s called Network Attached Storage, or NAS drives. A NAS consists of single or multiple drives attached directly to your router, rather than a single PC. They’re very useful for backups, but will also provide a centralized storage location for all the electronics in your home. A NAS can serve music, TV shows, movies, and other media to your living room and, in some implementations, your mobile devices when you’re away from home.
NAS enclosures don’t come cheap — easy-to-use and feature-packed products like the Drobo FS and Synology NAS systems range from $200 to $500 without drives. However, more affordable options from D-Link, Buffalo, and other consumer manufacturers offer slightly fewer features at prices from $100 to $150. The ones linked here even include RAID 1 mirroring, keeping your data mirrored and safe.
If you’ve got several computers in your home, a NAS is definitely worth considering. NAS drives that support Apple’s AFP protocol work perfectly with Time Machine and can backup multiple Macs without a problem. Setting up a backup on a NAS with Windows is a little more challenging, but most enclosures include their own backup software that can streamline the process. The added functionality and reliability of a NAS comes with a slightly higher learning curve and setup time, but once you’ve got it configured, a NAS is a rock-solid backup target for multiple computers. Apple’s Time Capsule is a good choice for Mac users who just want things to work, but they’re expensive and have had reliability problems in the past, making them hard to recommend.
What's best for you?
For most people, CrashPlan+ Unlimited’s combination of local and cloud storage offers an easy-to-use, secure, and redundant backup strategy that works automatically in the background. It’s low price and multi-platform support for all the PCs in your home make it one of the best options for home users looking to keep their data safe.
Best Backup For Mac Computer
Having an automated backup of any kind is what’s important
Using a RAID 1 enclosure with Time Machine, CrashPlan’s free client, or a commercial backup app like Genie Timeline Professional is a great way to make sure your data is very well protected from spontaneous hard drive failure without using cloud storage. That said, a NAS enclosure can be had for not much more (less, in some cases) and can provide a great deal of functionality beyond simple backups.
Backup Hard Drive For Mac And Pc
Ultimately, having an automated backup of any kind is what’s important. There’s a certain atmosphere of impermanence to a digital lifestyle — we switch devices all the time, online services come and go, and computers get more reliable all the time. But if Honan’s self-described epic hacking taught me one thing, it’s that I have to be responsible for my data. It’s easier to let a company worry about the details, but accidents happen. Data gets lost. The old adage saying “if you want something done right, you’ve got to do it yourself” rings truer than ever, even in an age where online services are climbing over one another to handle your data. You’ll have to decide what works best for you, but the peace of mind that comes with knowing your data is safe makes it well worth the trouble.