Backing up my Apple Mac from scratch2

A few months ago my sister returned from her tour across the USA armed with a viscous tan and a few thousand photos. A few weeks later, she rang me in desperate hope..”my laptop shows me a blue screen” she said. Of course, she didn’t have anything backed up. Long story short, she lost everything and I still feel for her.

I’m sure its no silver lining for my sister, but this made me think about my own situation. I have recently moved home across the UK and somehow my external hard drive ended up in my storage unit and completely out of reach. This means that currently I have approx 160GB of unbacked up data.

The Inevitable – I’m sure there must be millions of people out there who have experienced the gut retching feeling of losing data. I never ever want to feel that pain so this is how I spent the last few days ensuring I’m fully backed up.

Bought an External Hard Drive

I had to bite the bullet. After much research I decided on this hard drive. Even though my internal hard drive is 200GB, I decided to buy the biggest hard drive I could afford as im not in the habit of deleting stuff. I have to say that Im impressed with this hard drive so far, its incredibly quiet and its seemed to sync with Time Machine like is was born too (more on Time Machine later).

Partition the Hard Drive.

Before I even powered up my new hard drive, I had already decided that I was going to use Apple Macs backup application ‘Time Machine’, but it would be daft to allocate all 1TB (1024 GB) of my new hard drive to my 200GB mac. So I opened up Disk Utility (Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility) and partitioned my hard drive into 3 partitions:

1. 300 GB for Time Machine
2. 300 GB for MacBook Pro Files
3. 331 GB for Other Comps (this is the rest of the 1TB space)

1. The first 300GB for Time Machine is for exactly that. If my internal hard drive is 200GB, then im giving Time Machine an extra 100GB space for the extra daily incremental backups.

2. 300GB for MacBook Files, (I couldn’t think of a better name) this is where I’ll store some of the big files that are hogging up some of the space on my internal drive.

3. 331GB for Other Comps. I have windows PC that I sometimes work on, my wife has a Mac and sometimes the dust is blown of an old laptop, so really this partition is to backup anything on any of these computers.

Cleaning up my Mac before any backup

If you’ve got a MacBook Pro like me, chances are you could have the 200GB hard drive too. (although, what they didn’t tell you is that really you only get 186GB due to the maths).  Anyhow, I only had 25GB left, and that meant that my internal hard drive had approx 160GB of documents and files clogging it up.

On my internal hard drive, I had:

• 25GB – iTunes
• 28GB – Films
• 16GB – Home Movies
• 15GB – Photos
• 10GB – Trash (yes, its embarrassing, but its true, my trash can was 9.3GB)
• 6GB – Downloads (this should never be this high either)
• 4GB – Documents that could be deleted.

Thats nearly 100GB of data that I could just move onto my new external hard drive.

I deleted the trash (that was a given) and then I moved all of the above (except the photos as I don’t mind them being backed up twice) to the MBP_files partition and this freed up nearly 50% of my internal hard drive as well as giving my mac a huge performance boost.

What to back up on Time Machine?

First thing is first. What I do I need to backup? everything.. errr no not really. I could do, but that wold mean using unnecessary space and longer backup times.

This is my essential backup list:

• Documents – Contracts, Letters, Receipts, Instructions, CV etc… etc…
• Photos – Everyone has a million photos these days and every single photo is important to us. So I’ve made sure to back these up.
• Sites – I’m a web developer and over the years I must have built a hundred websites and spent a thousand hours coding them. I’ll be dammed if I’m losing these.
• Emails – This was a tricky one. I have a lot of important emails. Many of them are receipts with license keys, some are client emails and others just contain useful information, however, I use Gmail and that me wonder if I needed to make a back up? I mean, gmail is always online, never unavailable right? wrong, I found out that even googleMail has its bad days and sometimes my number 1 email client is unavailable. What if I needed to get at an email urgently. Even worse, what is the impossible happens and gmail goes AWOL? I thought about this and came to the conclusion that its probably wise to backup my emails. To achieve this, I activated the POP3 setting in Gmail, opened up my Mail app and connected to Mail app to my gmail. Now my gmail account pushes a copy of every email to my Mac Mail app. The beauty? I can create a backup of my Mac Mail account (~/library/mail).
• Library – This stores most of my application settings, plugins, my keychain settings, divers etc…

What I chose NOT to back up on Time Machine?

• Applications – To be honest, there is nothing here that I could not download again. All of my license keys are stored in my emails and they are backed up, so its all good. Although I do have a list of my apps backed up so I know which apps to download again. You can also create a list of your apps by entering the following command into your terminal window:
  ls -l /Applications /Applications/Utilities > ListOfApps.txt
• Movies – I don’t really need to back these up on a regular basis. Typically movies are large files and they eat up alot of internal hard drive space, so I will continue to store these on the MBP_files partition.
• Music – Same as above, my music doesnt need to be backed up by Time Machine, I can back this up myself just like I do with Movies.
• Other – There are also some folders definitely not worthy of backing up (Trash can, downloads, dropbox, ant tmp folders etc…)

Running Time Machine for the first time

No that my hard drive is clutter free, all large files moved onto my external hard drive and armed with the knowledge of exactly what I wish to backup,  all I need to do is start my Time Machine application.

Fortunately there are already numerous blogs on ow to do this. I followed this guide on maclife.com and recommend it as it worked well for me.

Once I began Time Machine, it took an hour to back up approx 90GB.

Once the backup finished, there was no confirmation, but I could see that the backup was successful by clicking on the small Time Machine icon in the top bar of my mac where it displays the last backup time.

The rest, is backed up history.