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Backing Up
Automatic backups are easy. If you’re backing up to an attached hard disk, networked disk, or iDisk with an automatic schedule enabled, your Mac will just perform the backup on schedule. Remember, your computer must be turned on and ready to go when the backup time comes along; if it isn’t, that backup will be completely skipped. The only thing Backup does that kind of bugs me is that it bounces the Backup icon in the Dock and displays a dialog box (see Figure 13) when it goes to work. Although you can ignore both and the backup will go on as scheduled, I find it distracting. That’s why I schedule my backups for first thing in the morning, before I arrive.
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Figure 13 You can ignore this dialog box (but you can’t prevent it from appearing).
If your automatic or manual backup is to CD or DVD, you’ll see a dialog box like the one in Figure 14 when it’s time to complete the backup. Click Continue and feed your Mac the necessary CDs or DVDs until the backup is done.
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Figure 14 Backup may give you some work to do.
You know, until I started using Backup, I never used DVDs for backing up. But with 4.7GB capacities, they’re great when you need to back up a lot of data. Sure beats sitting around feeding multiple CDs into my Mac.
You can initiate a backup at any time by selecting the backup you want to start in the main Backup window (refer to Figure 6) and clicking the Backup button.
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During a backup, Backup will keep track of its progress in its main window (see Figure 15). If it’s an automatic backup, Backup will quit when it’s done.
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Figure 15 Backup shows backup progress in its main window while backing up.
Oh, and if you launch Backup again, you can see the status of the last backup performed, right in the Backup window, as shown in Figure 16.
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Figure 16 Backup tells you about the last backup performed for each plan.