How To Back Up Files With Time Machine Alternatives

How To Back Up Files With Time Machine Alternatives -

I regularly back up new media additions (photos, music, videos) to an external drive. In the Finder, I drag the folders I want to back up over to the external drive’s icon on my Desktop. Is there a way to have just the newly added items be backed up instead of having to back up the whole folder all over again? The only options the Finder gives me are Cancel or Replace. I hit Replace of course, but it copies the whole folder again.

First off, kudos to you for backing up. You’d be surprised how many people never back up at all. We hear from readers every day desperate to figure out how to resurrect data from their Macs, which of course they’ve never backed up. Even Mac|Life editors are guilty of not backing up as much as they should. That’s the thing about hard drives: the question isn’t if they will fail, but when they will fail. So everyone should always be prepared for the day their hard drive decides to conk out.

What you need in this case is a backup app that does incremental backups. Rather than making a new copy of all your data every time you back up (which is what you’re doing now), an incremental backup only copies files that have changed since last time. This will save you a ton of time when backing up an ever-growing media collection.

ChronoSync is one of our favorites, but there are plenty of solutions for incremental backups.

Time Machine works using an incremental backup, but it’s not as flexible as other dedicated backup tools. One of my favorite backup applications is ChronoSync ($40, econtechnologies.com) which lets you create multiple backup scenarios, updating documents every 30 minutes and iTunes media once a day, for example. If you don’t need to get that specific, there are lots of other cheaper (or free) options—just look for something that does incremental backups. In fact, many modern portable hard drives come with backup software already installed. Western Digital’s backup software SmartWare, in particular, is easy to use, and it works with your Mac out of the box.

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