I backed up my Mac to my iPod ... and a Mac-backup rant

You know how I'm always preaching the religion of backups -- and double- and triple-backups?

Well, I started hearing some strange noises from the nearly 5-year-old iBook G4, and while we have most of the critical files backed up on CD-R, we really needed at least one (if not two) backups of ALL the user files.

For the Mac, Superduper is the go-to backup program, even though I'm not its No. 1 fan. I only say this because I can't seem to figure out how to do different kinds of backups on different days (say ... a full system backup weekly and user files every day into separate partitions to provide a daily snapshot of the drive over the course of a week). But Superduper works well enough. I've been using it on my mom's G5 for quite awhile now.

But I wanted to do something different. I didn't want to buy a backup drive.

I wanted to use my iPod. You see, I have a 30 GB iPod Video that only has about 3 GB of stuff on it. And I'm not exactly a daily iPod user. Most of the time in the course of my daily life, I need to hear what's going on around me, and I pretty much only listen to music in my car. And the el-cheapo iPod FM modulator that I bought for about $9 worked like total crap. My occasional workout lately has been swimming -- no iPod there. So I pretty much never use it.

So that spare 25 GB is fair game for an essential system backup. My iPod was already set up to be used as a disk for data files, so I figured I'd try Superduper. I downloaded it and dragged the proper image into the Applications folder (ah ... the simple pleasures of Mac app installation -- it should all be this easy). Then I selected the "to" and "from" drives.

I was only doing a backup of the user files. I don't believe in "full" backups -- with a Firewire drive you can even make a bootable backup with Superduper, and many modern Windows PCs can boot from a plain old USB drive. I think an occasional rebuild of the entire OS from scratch is a good thing -- it clears away the cobwebs.

And it takes way less space and time to backup the user files only.

So when I started Superduper, it warned me with something like, "the drive in this iPod will be TOTALLY erased to make this backup." And I wanted to keep my music files on there, so I stopped the process immediately.

I then did it the quick and dirty way. I opened the iPod's Finder window, opened up another Finder window for the Mac's hard drive, and then dragged the Users folder into the iPod's Finder window. The backup began and took about a half-hour. I can't do an easy incremental backup like I can with Superduper (only moving new or changed files), but at least all my essential files -- this is our main computer, after all -- are backed up.

I do plan to get an external drive or two -- probably USB if I can get them cheap enough -- and back up the users files with Superduper, continuing to do so on a regular basis.

But having an additional backup on an iPod is, indeed, a great thing.

Soapbox time: The Mac is already f'n expensive. Apple should include an easy-to-use GUI backup utility. When you get into the Unix-y guts of the Mac by opening up the Terminal program, there is not only one way to backup files, but FOUR (thanks for this info goes to O'Reilly's MacDevCenter -- and get "Learning Unix for Mac OS X" already!).

For me, either I'm thick as a brick, or the "easy to use" claims that every other Web site seem to attach to Superduper are overblown. I think Apple can -- and should -- be doing way better and giving its users a FREE backup utility that is integrated into the GUI. Will this be included in the forthcoming OS X 10.5 Leopard?

Once again, not holding my breath. But if Steve Jobs and Co. were to come through, it'd be nice.

Morale of the story: You cannot master Mac OS without getting deep into its Unix base. Get the book now! Sure, there will probably be an update for Leopard, but just get it now and get your hands dirty.