Apple G5 new external hard drive backup help

[Allen]

I've been gambling for years with no backup hard drive. I finally purches a 500gb Free Agent drive this week.

I've almost maxed out my Apple G5 because of the huge amount of RAW photos stored on it. I'm not very familiar with how external hard drives work and this one didn't come with many instructions. What would be the best way to store my photos now? Keep copies on BOTH hard drives? What's the easiest way to get my photos in iPhoto over to the new hard drive?

I've never used my Time Machine feature. Is now the time to try that out?

[digitalpixels]

Many ways to do this. You might want to try out the Time Machine feature. Haven't yet used it myself, so I really can't say much about it.

Always have a backup. And a backup of a backup. After losing two hard drives, 1 year of photos, I learned my lesson the hard way.

Backup your photos on your external hard drive. I would even make DVDs of the files as well. Hard drives fail.

There's many ways to put your pictures on your new external. You can drag your photos folder to the hard drive, or you can do a select all of your photos and do a file->export inside of iPhoto.

[Rcowan]

Hi All,
Just got a new MacbookPro and am in the process of moving and copying things as well. You can copy the entire iPhoto Library to the backup drive if you want. I plan to get the new Time Capsule and use it for my backup. I haven't tried Time Machine yet either, but it should work for what you want to move regularly. My PC died recently and I am trying to move all of my data to the Mac and back up everything.
Computers. Fun, fun, fun, eh?

[ChuckW]

Two backup methods that I have used and trust are Time Machine and SuperDuper. Time Machine is better at finding and restoring an individual file as it existed at some point in past time. A disadvantage of Time Machine is that it does not make the drive bootable so if you would lose your main drive you would need to boot the computer by other means, perhaps from your original installation disk.

SuperDuper makes a bootable copy of your entire disk, so it makes restoring an entire disk full of information pretty easy. SuperDuper, however, only keeps the latest version of a file that you backed up - so finding a particular past version is not possible.

Both programs take quite a long time to do the first backup, but incremental backups after that go pretty fast.

[Allen]

Thanks for the replies.

I really need to go through and delete a ton of photos first. I've just been too lazy to do so.

[d2creative]

Another vote for superduper.