Software To Backup USB Drive?

How do I backup my Mac to my external hard drive which is also Windows compatible?

• I purchased an external hard drive - Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Ultra-Portable Drive 500GB USB 3.0 For PC & Mac - to backup my Macbook Pro. When I first inserted it into my Mac, I selected the option to use the hard drive under Windows & Mac, so that I am able to read & write files when connected into both systems. So the hard drive is under the NTFS driver. (So I can't use Time Machine to backup.) I have only ever backed up my Mac once, and that was the first time using a video tutorial on YouTube. However, I think I backed up my WHOLE system, as when I finished the back-up, it took up about, or over, 250GB of space on the hard drive. However, I am having trouble backing up my system files to the hard-drive a second time, as am not sure what I should backup. Do I backup my whole system (again??)? If so, how? Or do I backup certain folders/files? Which are deemed the most important to backup? Do I backup certain system elements?? Or do I delete my previous backup and create a new backup in the hard drive? Or how would I go about creating a backup that backed up only 'newer' files, so that I would keep the old backup? Is there a software that could help me/do the backup for me?? I am very confused - please help! If you could provide a clear video tutorial, it'd be much appreciated.

• Answer:

  You DO NOT need Carbon-Copy Cloner or any software other than what you already have. Also, Carbon-Copy Cloner can only back up system files to an HFS+ formatted volume. To make a perfect clone of all the files from the internal drive volume onto an external drive volume, do this.... -- Open Disk Utility. -- Select any drive. -- Select the "Restore" tab. -- Drag the internal drive volume ("Macintosh HD" for example) to the "Source" space. -- Drag the external drive volume to the "Destination" space. -- Click the "Restore" button. -- Take a long walk-- no, I mean a two or three hour walk. That will copy every file to the external drive volume.You can't boot the computer to OS X on an NTFS volume, but if the internal drive volume gets out of sorts and you can only get it back into line by erasing / formatting it, you can use the ext. volume as a restore source while booted to an OS X install DVD. If the external volume were partitioned GUID Partition Table or Apple Partition Map and formatted "Mac OS Extended", you could either use Time Machine, or do the same restore process above, but with the added advantage of not needing any DVD to restore back. The external volume would be bootable. BTW, if as you say, you can read-write to the NTFS volume in OS X, you must have some third-party software installed to enable that. The Apple NTFS driver does not have write enabled. As for what to backup, you either try to keep everything (OS and documents) fully backed up or just your personal documents, songs, movies, etc. -- Periodic, incremental backups (copying only changed or new files) are painfully difficult to do manually. That's why you use Time Machine. Other apps claim to do this also, but you have Time Machine already, and it works well. -- If you settle for one decent restore of everything, you can replace the home folder with the new home folder every week to get all your new documents, songs, movies, etc. The disadvantage of this is that any Software Updates for the OS and Apple apps can only be reliably applied by doing a whole restore of the internal drive to the ext. drive again. It's a time consuming process, but reliable. -- Time Machine does both of these tasks or can be limited to only your documents, whatever you choose. It also has more than one backup, so if you trash a file and then a week later want it back, you can recover it from a Time Machine backup. When the ext. drive gets nearly full, Time Machine has to allow the oldest backup to disappear to make room for the newest one. Your ext. drive may end up with two, six, or thirty weekly backups, depending on size.