This was always a challenge during my Windows days. In part because there were no now high capacity external hard drives, but mostly because it was a tedious chore. And maybe I just wasn’t smart enough of disciplined enough. Best I could manage was to copy some documents and photos to some floppies and pray I didn’t the computer HD didn’t die.

That really changed for me when I switched to Mac and started using Time Machine. When I got to the office each morning I’d plug an external hard drive in and forget about. It did incremental back-ups in the background.

While I never had a hard drive failure, I frequently needed a file that I had mistakenly deleted. I don’t recall how we addressed this in the old Windows days but seems like you had to do a full restore (a major deal) to get that one file back. With Time Machine I just flip back through the backups until I find one where the missing file existed. Just drag the file to my desktop and it’s back.

[Allow me to stipulate that smarter folks than I probably had no trouble managing backups on Windows.]

Barb has less time for this kind of routine (but critical chore) so she doesn’t do backups as often as she should but I think we’ve solved that problem.

The AirPort Time Capsule is “a superfast Wi‑Fi base station and an easy-to-use backup device all in one.” No more plugging in external hard drives. When we fire up one of our MacBooks it periodically does the incremental backup. With two terabytes of storage, the Time Capsule manages backups for both Barb and me.

Because I’m a little paranoid about backups, I also run Carbon Copy Cloner once a week. And I’m going to start keeping a copy off site.