Baby's Got Backup; How to back up your Macintosh

Don't worry about copying the contents of your entire hard drive-- even if you must reinstall the Mac OS itself, almost all of yourprograms will still work. Instead, focus on backing up your owncreations.

1) Buy an external Zip drive. You do not want to back up a fullhard drive on floppies, nor is there much point in buying a Jazdrive that will be twice as expensive as the $150 Zip. Plus, a Zipis light enough to haul to another computer should yours becometotally inoperative.

2) Get some software to do the backups for you. The best optionis Connectix's Speed Doubler 8, which includes a "copy agent" inaddition to its system-speedup tools. This $50 program is a snap toconfigure: Just select what to copy, where to copy it to, how tomake those copies (the "smart copy" option saves time by onlyreplacing files that have changed), and how often to back up things.Once a week should suffice.The freeware Simple Backup is another, less effective option --it lacks any scheduling function, so you have to remember to use it,and is more confusing to configure. But unlike Speed Doubler 8, itworks on older Macs and is, again, free. Download it athttp://mirror.apple.com/Mirrors/ info-mac/disk/simple-backup-14.hqx3) There are three kinds of files you should back up every time:a) Your documents. This is easy if you've saved all of your filesin one folder (such as the "Documents" folder you can create bychecking off a button in the lower right corner of the GeneralControls control panel). So do that.b) Your e-mail. If you're using any version of Eudora, you'llnormally want to back up the entire Eudora Folder, located withinthe System Folder. Other programs generally store mail in the sameplace as the mail program itself; the best way to find that is touse the "Find File" tool (in the Apple menu) to dig up folderscalled "Mail."c) Your settings. That is, any program or system-wide settingsthat would be a pain to recreate from scratch, along with your Webbrowser bookmarks. Look in the Preferences sub-folder of the SystemFolder on your hard drive; if you see any of these files or foldersthere, put them on your backup list:+ TCP/IP Preferences+ Remote Access folder+ PPP Preferences+ Internet Preferences+ Stickies File+ Inside the Netscape Preferences folder: Bookmarks.html+ Inside the Explorer folder: Favorites.html