A few desirable things to have in a backup:
1. Having one in the first place! Most people never back up their data, the hard drive is usally the first thing to fail in a computer.
2. Multiple backups. It is very handy to archived backups. If you have a file that changes often, you may need to go to an old revision of the file instead of the very last one.
3. Off site backup. If you house burns down, or someone steals you computer and the backup drive that was sitting next to it, then you will lose all your data. Storing a backup off site is important.
4. Reliable backups. Sometimes your backup software does not work like you think it should, or something else goes wrong. The only way to know if your backup actually has the data you need is to test it and make sure that it's a good backup.
Pros: It's off site automatically, and you can sometimes retrieve your data even if your not home.
Cons: Usually slow to do a full backup, there is usually no archived backups. For example, I tried to backup my pictures, which are 13 gigs. It said the first folder of 1.6 gigs would take 18 hours to backup!
Examples: a .mac account or xdrive
This is by far the best way in my opionion. The reason is that if you drive every fails, all you have to do is pull out the backup hard drive, plug it in and boot off of it like nothing happened.
First off you have to buy an external hard drive (I recommend one that has firewire)
Second, you will need a program to make a complete bootable backup.
A free one is Carbon Copy Cloner
A commercial product is Super Duper, but you can use the basic features for free.
I tried Carbon Copy to upgrade the hard drive in our Imac and it worked great. All I had to do was
copy everything to the new hard drive, rip apart my computer to swap the drives and Presto! Bigger hard drive.
Cons: No incremental backups, if your original hard drive gets corrupted and you make a backup,
before you notice the problem, your only backup will be corrupted to!
To boot off your external hard drive just hold down Apple-Option-Shift-Delete while powering on your mac.
Or if you have a newer mac, hold down the option key and it will let you pick which hard drive you want.
Note that you G4 or G5 clone will not boot on an Intel mac...
You could most likely backup all the important documents from your hard drive onto one CD or DVD if you don't include pictures, movies, or songs.
Also you can back up to a thumb drive, or even an IPod if you have the right software.
One way to fit more on a CD is to compress your folders before putting them on a CD. There are 2 easy ways to do this
1. Right click on the folder and select Create an Archive of 'folder'
2. Run Disk Utility and go to File -> New -> Disk Image from folder
Pick the folder you would like to compress
When it asks you for a filename for the archive next to Image Format select 'compressed'
You can then put the compressed documents on a CD or DVD.
If you don't mind waiting for Leapord, it will include Time Machine.
Some people are comparing it to system restore on windows, I assure you that this is not as useless as system restore!
It will let you backup all your files to another hard drive, and it will keep a old versions of files that changes daily (like a quicken, or database file) It will let you pick a file from a certain day and restore it. The only thing I wish it did is make a Bootable backup.
If your G3 computer is running a little slow and you want to upgrade it to go a little faster, I recommend that you don't.
There are 2 problems with upgrading G3 systems:
1. The max hard drive that it can handle is around 120 gigs
2. The older style Ram it really expensive.
If you have a G4 or G5 more ram and a bigger hard drive will turn that old machine into one that can go a few more years
If you are wondering if an upgrade will help your computer out a bit, there are really only 2 things you can upgrade
If you are regularly deleteing files to make room on your hard disk all the time, you are a prime candidate for a hard disk upgrade.
One other bonus is that if your hard drive was a slower 5000 RPM drive and you put in a 7000 RPM drive, the your whole computer will seem a little faster than before. You also get the added benefit of a defragmented hard drive when your done.
I usually buy my hard drive locally at the CompUsa, Wal-mart or Sam's, but if I don't mind waiting Pricewatch is a good website. Most older macs use a EIDE or sometimes called ATA hard drive. Newer macs use Sata hard drives. You can pick up a 300 gig hard drive for around $100 nowdays.
To find out if you need ATA or S-ATA: go to the apple menu and 'about this mac' then click on 'more info' and then 'Serial-ATA' if you see a device there then you need a Sata drive, if nothing is there then you need a ATA drive.
I found a website that showed me how to take apart my Imac G4 called accelerate your mac
There article I used is http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/systems/iMac_g4/imacg4_takeapart.html
(note if you have an Imac G4 I strongly recommend only upgrading the ram you can get to easily, tearing apart this machine and
putting back together is not easy!)
To upgrade your hard drive, all you have to do is follow the steps mentioned above for a complete clone backup! Then swap you hard drive from your computer with the one you just backed up to.
If you system is having problems and you don't want to 'copy' the problem, then I would replace the hard disk first, do a fresh install of OS X and then copy the data over from the old hard drive.
There is an easy way to tell if you have enough RAM. Run all the programs that you usually run and then find the program 'activity monitor' in your utilities folder. If it show less than 30 megs of ram free then you could use a little more RAM.
Most computers have at least one ram slot you can get to. But be carefull, if all your slots are full, you will have to pull out some old Ram before putting more in.
To find out how many slots you have and how much is in each one, go to the apple menu and 'about this mac' then click on 'more info' and then 'Memory'
There are 3 big websites that you can check out:
Kingston, Crucial, and DataMem
I consider 512 Megs of ram a bare minimum these days, and 1 gig is a good amount.
Buying a 512 meg stick for my Imac is around $90, but if you have a newer mac, it's a little cheaper for a 512 stick.
IClip 3 was a free download for a few days, download it here
They have a lite version and a new 4.0 version. It is like the scrapbook for OS 9,
but much more powerfull! You can organize you clipings into bins and it will store
text, movies and sounds.