There are three options for performing a back up of your hard disk: a locally connected USB or FireWire storage device, a network backup server or storage device, or an Internet based back up service.
Locally Connected Storage Device
Recent desktop and portable computers from Apple feature Universal Serial Bus (USB) and FireWire ports that make it easy to attach high capacity mass-storage devices that are ideal for backing up the larger hard disk installed.
As an alternative to backing up to floppy disks, the following USB options are available:
- the USB SyQuest SparQ disk holds up to 1 GB
- the USB Imation SuperDisk holds up to 120 MB
- the USB Iomega Zip disks holds up to 250 MB
- the FireWire VST Technologies hard drive has capacities starting at 10 GB
To see some of the USB storage devices, and other USB devices, refer to:
http://www.apple.com/usb
Network Backup Server
If you're connected to a network, you can use products such as Retrospect from Dantz Development to back up your files to a large volume on the network, a DAT drive, or some other media. To read about Retrospect :
http://www.dantz.com
Internet Back Up Service
There are several back up resources on the Internet, including Apple's iDisk, that you can use to back up files on your hard drive.
Note: Some Internet backup solutions have less disk space than the removable media mentioned earlier in the article. .Mac members get 10 GB total storage for iDisk and .Mac Mail with the option to purchase up to 30 GB, so check with the back up solution vendor for space limitations and select the one that matches your data back up needs.