"Hi all," begins Jim Hamm. "Here is an article, from Mac Tips and Tricks Newsletter, on creating a bootable backup for your Mac. We've had some other backup comments recently, and I'm interested in feedback on this process from anyone that would want to comment on a couple of questions I have:

1) do you have a bootable backup for your Mac?
2) did you purchase a separate external hard drive to do this on?
3) do you use Carbon Copy Cloner or some other program to do this?
4) how important do you consider doing this?

I've been using a Mac for 2 1/2 years or so, and haven't done this yet. I guess I'm at risk of losing all my bookmarks, addresses, RSS feeds, third-party programs, etc., if I should have a hard drive failure. A real pain--impossible?--to resurrect all this. I'm torn, in my mind, on whether to go to the expense of doing this or not. Comments appreciated."

Click to drop Jim a line here.

First up to reply is Art Gorski. He writes, "Hi, Jim.

1) I create one right before installing a major OS update.

2) Yes, but I've only got one drive and 3 Macs.

3) I used CCC years ago, but SuperDuper is free (for this purpose) and slicker.

4) I have both Chronosync backups and Time Machine backups on my network ReadyNAS, although not the System and not bootable. That's close enough for me."