If you read Part One, posted 12-29, then you're ready for the next installment by De Prez Allen Laudenslager. He begins with, "I back up with both Super Duper and Time Machine.

"Super Duper will create a bootable sector on your external drive that will allow you to boot from the external drive if your internal drive quits for any reason. The process to select which drive to boot from is: turn your Mac off. Boot while holding the option/alt key down. This will bring up a dialog box listing any internal, external or CD drive the computer can access. Select your external drive and your back up and running on the external drive.

"Super Duper is free, but will only backup ALL the files you select, changed from the last back up or not. If you pay the $15 bucks, then you only need to fully back up once, all future backups will only be changed files, much faster that way.

"Since I’m on a laptop, my external drive is not always connected. I do a Super Duper back up at least once a week. I backup with Time Machine whenever I do anything that I would hate to lose, every two to three days at least.

"My goal is to be able to restore my hard drive in case of another crash. So my restore process would be to install the new internal drive and then boot from my external drive and restore from Super Duper, which will reinstall all my software including the OS. Then do a Time Machine restore to get my files (to the latest backup date/time).

"Without a fatal crash or a blank drive to try this on, I can’t be sure it will work the way I expect, but my Mac expert claims that it should. I am sure that all the files I need will be on the drive, it is just the recovery steps that are in question. And since restoring the files will not erase them from my external drive, if I make a mistake, all it will take is time to get the step right."