How To: Backup your Mac with iBackup

It was made known at last years WWDC that a mere 4% of Mac users backup their data. This preluded the announcement of leopard’s revolutionary feature, Time Machine to address this. Before this feature will be widely available, I have compiled this tutorial for those of us who are unaware of how to accomplish the essential task of backing up your hard drive on Mac OS X.

In this tutorial I will use iBackup, which is free for personal use, and can be downloaded here.

First of all, you should determine where you’d like to save your backup:

Simply click “Set” and choose your desired backup volume, in this case, mine is “backup.”

Now, it’s time to decide exactly what you’d like to backup.

After choosing a category, you can either select the category as a whole, by clicking the checkmark beside each respective category, or you can do so within their subcategories.

Now, it’s time to look at some of the more advanced options offered by iBackup, first, simply click the following icon:

The following window should now appear:

In the general tab, you can configure the backup to be uploaded to a server, or run scripts. Next, choose the “Backup Folders” tab:

Here, you can choose the name of your backup folder, and/or make this folder burnable. This tab can also limit the amount of backup folders in your backup location.

Next, click on the “Advanced” tab, here, you can set many UNIX “ditto” and “rsync” commands that can be executed during your backup.

Now, simply check whether there is enough space in your backup location in order to backup what you’ve selected. If there is, go on, if there isn’t, back-track and remove what can be removed in order to backup.

Finally, after all of your desired preferences have been set, you can proudly click the “backup now” button:

If all goes well, you should now see a dialog similar to this one:

Once that finishes, you should now have effectively backed up your hard drive. Now you can sleep at night