Wanna know how to back up your Mac properly? I haven’t had good luck with Apple’s built-in Time Machine application, but SuperDuper! has served me well for years. Here’s a simple step-by-step for backing up our Mac:
- Download a copy of SuperDuper! and pay for it. It’ll be the best $27.95 you’ve ever spent.
- Make sure you have a spare hard drive for backups. I recommend the Western Digital My Passport line. You can get a 500 GB drive for around $150
- Quit all running applications.
- Launch SuperDuper!
- Choose your Mac’s internal hard drive (typically this is Macintosh HD, unless you changed the name of it) in the drop-down menu on the left-hand side.
- On the right-hand drop-down, choose Disk Image, which will launch a window asking you where you want to place the disk image.
- Make sure you pick your external hard drive as the location on which the disk image will be saved, make sure you choose “Read/Write "Sparse” Image" for the Image Type, which you’ll see in that same window.
- Click Save
- Just below the two drop-down menus that tell you the source and destination for your backup, there’s another drop-down menu asking you what kind of backup you want to do. I recommend you choose “Backup – all files.”
- You’re ready to start the backup now, so click on the Copy Now button, enter your Mac’s password (this is the same password you enter when you install software).
- An alert will pop-down asking if you’re sure you want to continue, click Copy and off you go!
The backup process can take a long time. Like, really long, so I recommend running the backup before you go to bed and when you wake up in he morning, you should have a fresh backup of your Mac.