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Nothing you do with a computer will ever be as important as making a solid back up. Hard drives crash and without a back up you'll find yourself facing expensive data recovery services or simply without your data.
As part of Apple's upcoming Leopard OS the company is including a back up software system by the name of [Time Machine][1] which will offer incremental back up and recovery of files, but even this won't save you if your drive goes south.
Ideally even your back up system should be redundant, in other words at least two back ups on two forms of media, but at the very least you should have a clone of your hard drive handy should your primary system sink.
What you'll need
A secondary hard drive of equal or greater capacity to the machine you want to back up.
Some back up software from one of the third party vendors listed below (if you're Unix savvy you can get by with rsync and cron, which are built in to Mac OS X, but we'll just be looking at GUI solutions).
Options:
EMC (formerly Dantz) Retrospect (or Retrospect Express)
[Retrospect][3] is the classic Mac back up solution. It isn't cheap, but its comprehensive, full-featured and supports just about any media from high-end tape drives to optical media.
On the cost side, you may find a special edition of Retrospect, dubbed Retrospect HD is included with some external hard drives that specifically target the Mac. Retrospect HD is stripped down a bit from its sibling and only backs up to hard drives, but if its bundled with the drive there's no need to purchase the full version.
SuperDuper
[SuperDuper][4] is a relatively inexpensive piece of software designed to make it easy to clone a drive or back up folders.
In the free mode Super Duper makes it easy to create complete and/or user-specific back up clones to a hard disk or disk image image file (.dmg).
For $28 you can unlock the registered mode which allows you to schedule periodic back ups and also allows for more fine-grained control over which files get backed up.
SuperDuper also features a unique option named "Sandbox," which protects your boot disk from some types of catastrophic failure by creating a bootable copy of your system, stored on another hard drive that shares your personal documents and data with the original.
This allows you to install system updates or evaluation software in the Sandbox, without worrying about your actual system. If something does go wrong, you simply start up from the original system.
ChronoSync
[ChronoSync][2] is another synchronization option that allows for drag-and-drop cloning. Just drag the folders you'd like to sync onto the application windows and then choose your options. Chronosync offers quite a few sophisticated options for deciding which files are sync and which ones are ignored.
While ChronoSync is a decent back up option its also a very easy way to keep folders between two Macs in sync. For instance, if you have desktop machine and a laptop that you use when traveling, ChronoSync makes it very easy to sync up the laptop to the current state of the desktop whenever you head out of town.
ChronoSync will set you back $30 but you can download a demo copy to see if it fits your needs.
LaCie SilverKeeper
[SilverKeeper][5] is a simple, but capable back up program which allows you to back up files to any device that is mountable (i.e. CD, DVD, hard disk, tape drives etc).
Silverkeeper is made by the hard drive manufacturer LaCie and ships with many of its drives.
But if you're not interested in LaCie drives, never fear Silverkeeper is available as free download from the Lacie site.
Silverkeeper can set up schedules, make bootable clones, skip selected files and has a number of other nice customization features.
Internet back up
If you have a large library of media files this one probably isn't a good solution, but for a secondary (or third or fourth line of back up) the web is always an option.
There are a number of services (probably hundreds) that offer to back up your files. Most hover in the 1 gigabyte range so this obviously isn't for an entire drive, but it doesn't hurt to have an extra copy of your documents folder somewhere offsite.
Most Mac users have probably heard of [Apple's .Mac service][6] which offers a gigabyte of space for $100 a year (it also offers some other services not related to backing up files).
Dot Mac comes with some pre-designed templates that make it easy to back up key folders, but you can also roll your own template. Apple's back up solution will even run if your machine is asleep at the scheduled time.
[1]: http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/features/timemachine.html
[2]: http://www.econtechnologies.com/site/Pages/ChronoSync/chrono_overview.html
[3]: http://www.emcinsignia.com/products/smb/retroformac/
[4]: http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html
[5]: http://www.lacie.com/silverkeeper/
[6]: http://www.apple.com/dotmac/
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