A listener to the Geek News Central Podcast needed some help backing up data for his mac. The answer as suggested from Sam one of our listeners is below.
On today’s show you mentioned a listener who wanted to know how to back up a home directory. For most people the bulk of their home directory is likely to consist of their itunes and iphoto libraries. With itunes the easiest thing to do is create a special backup play list and then drag the entire contents of the library to this play list. One of the nice features of itunes is that if a play list exceeds the size of a blank disk it will automatically span multiple disks. From the itunes help file:
To create a data CD or DVD:
Choose Edit > Preferences, then click the Advanced tab and click Burning.
Choose Data CD as the Disc Format, then click OK.
Create a playlist that includes all the items you want to back up to the CD or DVD, and then make sure a checkmark appears beside each item.
You can only burn a CD or DVD from the songs in a playlist, and only checked items are included.
If the playlist contains more songs than will fit on one CD or DVD, iTunes will burn as many songs as will fit on one disc, and then ask you to insert another disc to continue burning the remaining songs. (You can see the size of the selected playlist at the bottom of the iTunes window.)
Select the playlist you want to burn to the CD or DVD, then click the Burn Disc button.
Insert a blank CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R, or DVD-RW disc, and click Burn Disc again.
With iphoto just create some albums that will fit on a disk (maybe organized by year) and then burn these albums to disk.
The remainder of the home directory often consists of text files and more than likely this stuff will all fit on one disk. This can be done by inserting a blank disk and then just dragging all these photos to the disk and burning.
Of course the easiest way to do all this is just get an external hard drive (firewire or usb 2 preferred) and drag the whole directory over and then unplug the drive and then stick it in the closet until the inevitable catastrophe occurs (of course you want to updated your backup periodically as well).
sam