Once upon a time my computer had a catastrophic hard drive failure, and lo, I was one sad puppy. My last back-up was several months prior, and boy did I feel stupid about it.
After witnessing the aftermath (read: after I spent several days crying and breathing into a paper bag), my husband went out and bought us an Apple Time Capsule, and now the Time Machine software automatically backs up my computer every hour. Now, the Time Capsule is hardly a cheap item, and I can certainly understand people who can’t take it as a business deduction (I did) feeling like it’s a bit out of their price range, even for the incredible peace of mind it affords.
But today is your lucky day, friends. Today Buy.com has a refurbished 500GB Time Capsule available for just $140 shipped. That’s crazy. Remember, the Time Capsule works with both Macs and PCs, and also functions as a wireless router.
Also, I whisper sweet nothings to mine on a regular basis. But that’s not required, really.
You don’t need a Time Capsule to use Time Machine, unless you want to back up over a network. We each have our own external hard drives hooked up to our iMacs, and Time Machine works just fine. I had a hard drive failure last year, and I was back up with my complete system 30 minutes after I brought my computer home.
We considered the network backup to one drive, but DH has a tendency to never delete anything (I finally got him to clear out Mac Classic stuff from ten year old computer transfers) and his backup drive fills up quickly, so he loses older backups. I’ve had occasions where I’ve needed to get at an email or file that was deleted over a year ago, so I want to retain those backups as long as possible.
I’m glad you didn’t die.
Also, look into mozy.com – for $5 a month it will back everything up online and you won’t have to worry about equipment failure or a fire!
I use Carbonite. I recently renewed for two years and it only cost me $50 (found a 1/2 off code)