How should I best back up my work?
Ever since my daughter stuffed a milk-bottle top into my floppy disc drive (now that’s going back a bit!) on the day a job was to go to press, I’ve been paranoid about backing up my work. This is how I do it:
1 I work on a Mac which has an application called Time Machine, which basically backs up the entire contents of your computer onto an external hard drive. Once you’ve bought the drive (it doesn’t have to be Mac’s Time Capsule – there are lots of cheaper versions available) connect it to your Mac, open Time Machine, and tell it to back up to your new drive. There are detailed instructions of how to back up and restore with Time Machine here.
2 I also copy work to a separate external hard drive, just in case the first one fails. I simply drag and drop onto the hard drive’s icon.
3 If that was the belt, this is the braces: uploading to the cloud. There are several ways you can do this. One is to use Dropbox, where you can upload files to a virtual fileserver. This is very good, and it’s free to upload small amounts. A good alternative which is very cost-effective (about £40 per year for me) is Carbonite, a system which backs up your files automatically. You can find out more about Carbonite here.
