http://www.anysim.net/

http://www.bmw-eba.de.tl

when it comes to hard-drives, apple tends to be fairly selective on which ones they choose to sell at official apple stores. So if you walk into an apple store and buy any drive, you’ll be getting a good deal. I would, however, stay away from the hard-drives that apple manufactures. It’s not that they’re bad… but you can get better… The apple endorsed (not the right word but i hope you know what i mean..) hard-drives are all great though…

I personally chose to go with a Lacie 250GB drive… it’s only $99 and it’s very reliable… connects easily with either firewire or USB 2.0… the drive also includes additional USB ports, so if you find yourself running low on space to plug all your cameras, iPods, iPhones, printers, game controllers, etc. then it can help you solve multiple problems… and with 250GB of space, it can do more than just back up files (my laptop is only 160GB so i sometimes store my original files on my Lacie if i’m not too worried about not having multiple copies)

In short, go to your local apple store, or the online one (which provides you with links to all of the apple supported companies for external drives) if you don’t have a physical one easily accessible to you. Browse around a little bit. Anything you buy there will be of fantastic quality. (had mine for about 4 years… never even the slightest problem…)

The best protection is given by: Offsite, offline backups
This protects your data against a variety of accidents, like:
Hardware failure,
Theft
Fire

But you need
100 Mbit/s link to secure data center
Backup space in data center
Automatic tape or optical disk backup in data center

This is expensive and only affordable for pros, not for the casually Mac user.

So what’s left…
For offline backup a program like Retrospect and a pile of DVD’s
Configuring is not easy, but once set, it works like a charm. Just click on the scrit short cut you can place on your desktop to remind making backups insert last DVD and go! Automatic handsfree backup you can store in your save. Make a extra set stored elsewhere and rotate, say weekly. This is the classic set up. Lot of disapline needed and that’s why so less people do it..

And than comes time machine……

I think this tool will be great, seen the demo Steve Jobs gave in his key note?
Automatic, once set, just forget Backs up to any attached disk and that’s the trick! Cause that means felability!

USB hard drive
Firewire hard drive (faster!)
Drive attached over network! And here comes in real flexibility

You can set up a other computer as backup server a old Mac or a cheap Linux box alike and set up a raid configuration with multiple drives which is very easy to do on a Mac and easy on a Linux box if you have the experience.

Share over that network with AFP or WEBDAVE and point time machine to this drive.
And Backups are made automaticly.
Once a week backup your backup server to DVD or tape and store this offsite. Use minimum two sets of DVD’s / tape’s so there is always one complete set on the offsite location

So my ideal solution is “Time Machine” a old mac with raid as backup-server combined with a once a week offsite backup.

so really, although it is the safest way of protecting your files, it can get tedious after a while. So what’s the solution? DVD’s!!!! I’m pretty confident that the best system to save your computer is to backup all music, video, photo, and text files to dvd’s, and then use an external hard-drive to backup the rest of your computer. by getting rid of things like music and video files (which i have 45 Gigs of… pain in the butt to copy all that over and over again) you can then easily transfer the rest of your computers information without wasting hours!