The Grafx Blogs

A couple of people have asked me what to do if you don’t have Time Machine on your Mac. My answer is to first see why you don’t have Time Machine, since it comes with Leopard (10.5) and Snow Leopard (10.6). Of course, there are many other reasons to upgrade your machine to Leopard or Snow Leopard, but backup is a pretty good place to start.

If you are stuck on Tiger (10.4) though, I’d recommend the software SuperDuper!. It’s a stupid name I’ll grant you, but it works really well and to use the basic features is free. I’d recommend it to anyone looking to backup their data one-time, but it’s no match for continual automatic backups if you have Time Machine.

You can download SuperDuper! for free, from www.Shirt-Pocket.com. You can then use the SuperDuper! to create a clone of your machine, an exact replica of your Macintosh HD to an external drive. This won’t be updated, but it’s a good one-time snap-shot as I said.

If you’d like help backing up on Tiger, Leopard or Snow Leopard then feel free to email me. We also have some other solutions we can provide for you starting around £25.

One of my most used applications, Dropbox is great for students, people with multiple computers and those wanting basic read-only access to documents on the go (on iPhone).

Dropbox is deceptively simple. Once installed you will have a Dropbox folder, just like any other in your Home folder. Drag any file or folder in there and it’s sync’d up instantly and invisibly to your online Dropbox account. You can then access that from any computer with an internet connection (just through a web browser), or on your iPhone (free app here).

Ninja move: install Dropbox on your iMac and your MacBook to get the contents sync’d across them automatically. You don’t even need both on at once as you can change something on the iMac, turn it off, go to work, open your MacBook and a few seconds later it will sync down and be ready for you.

If you want a simple way to get a few important files backed up off-site, to share files with friends online, or just to get your files/preferences sync’d across computers it’s a great way to go. Loads more info on uses and features can be found here, with a short demo video below.

Dropbox is free if you want up to 2GB storage (enough for most people). If you want to you can upgrade to 50GB for USD$9.99/month or 100GB for USD$19.99/month.

You can see a demo video here.