I’ve been meaning to get a proper backup system going for a while now and I’ve finally done so with Leopard’s built in “Time Machine” feature. The one thing I hate about thinking about backups is that you don’t want to test your method thoroughly, as that would require you to simulate a catastrophy (i.e. throwing your computer at a wall, or such like) and so it’s very hard to know what’s going to work. This is why I opted for a backup solution which has been written (and presumably tested) by a major IT expert – in this case Apple. I trust Apple a lot – their software is usually flawless and their hardware even more so. And when there are problems, they fix them quickly (e.g. MobileMe problems).

After upgrading my MacBook hard drive, my overflow external drive was spare and so I’ve commissioned it into being a dedicated Time Machine backup drive. Currently it’s whirring away doing the initial backup (some 145.8GB of data…) and when that’s done it will do incremental backups every time I plug the drive in and click “Backup Now”.

I’ve never had to restore anything from backups, ever (*touches wood*), and I’m hoping I never will. But having a good backup plan is critical to modern day life because we hold so much information on our drives. I’d hate to lose all my data, it would really be so annoying.

So once this initial backup is complete, I’ll be a backed up man, ready to roll.