How do you back up a Lap Top?

Asked by jabag11 (676

) December 20th, 2010

I really know next to nothing about backing up a Lap Top. I’m planning on buying an external Hard Drive from the store to back up ALL my data and important information, videos, movies etc. from my lap top to the hard drive once a week incase the laptop breaks or something. Can you please tell me everything I will need to know to do this, and just any general information, the more the marrier! And please don’t just copy/paste the info from a website =D.

I know this is a broad question but that’s because I don’t know much about this stuff.

I have a MacBook Pro 10.5.8, It’s total “Capacity” is 150gb and there is 50gb worth of space left on the computer. My goal is only to back up this information just incase my lap top ever breaks or gets stolen because my LIFE is on my laptop. I am planning to buy two external Hard Drives to be safe.

This is what I think I know, how I believe it all works, and the best way to do it – please correct what I have wrong:

So, all I do is go to the store, buy an external hard drive about 500 gb right? Someone said 1T is too much for a laptop, that it’s “Dangerous”, someone who does know about computers mind you. So anyways once I buy it, I simply connect it to my computer through a “firewire” instead of a usb since firewires are faster, (someone said) and I do this once a week to back up all the data from the lap top to the external hard drive and Presto! That’s it right? Anything else I should know about all of this?

please help, all answeres appreciated thank you!

Observing members: 0

Composing members: 0

7 Answers

1T isn’t dangerous, it just isn’t needed. You only need a 200GB external hard drive. Just plug it in via USB, and copy and paste all the files from your hard drive to the external hard drive. You can do it once a week, but you probably don’t need to unless you’re adding lots of stuff all the time. Once you’ve done the initial backup, you only need to add the files you’ve recently downloaded (ie new music, new picture, new documents, etc) to the hard drive – you don’t need to add every file all over again.

MyNewtBoobs (19059

)“Great Answer” (0

) Flag as…

Use Carbon Copy Cloner. It will make a bootable copy.

What I would do is make three partitions on a 1TB drive. 200 to clone your drive, 300 for Time Machine, and 500 for extra storage.

world_hello (1198

)“Great Answer” (2

) Flag as…

500 gb hard drive will be plenty. They’re cheap.

Rarebear (25192

)“Great Answer” (0

) Flag as…

You can save files in the ‘cloud’ by emailing them to googlemail or saving them in Skydrive. That way your files are safe even if your house and laptop get sucked up by a tornado.

flutherother (34532

)“Great Answer” (0

) Flag as…

@flutherother If his house is sucked up by a tornado, he won’t be worried about his laptop, he’ll be too busy trying to kill a witch and skip in ruby red heels…

MyNewtBoobs (19059

)“Great Answer” (1

) Flag as…

I would suggest an online backup system such as Carbonite. I assume Skydrive is the same thing as suggested by @flutherother . It does the backup whenever you are online and doesn’t require you to schedule backups or decide what to backup. Easy and convenient. It does however carry a monthly fee, usually about $5.

If you’re not PC savvy, this would be you simplest solution and no drive to buy or maintain.

Jaxk (17627

)“Great Answer” (0

) Flag as…