If you are running Mac OS X 10.5 or 10.6 it has Time Machine built in. Just connect an external HD and it will ask if you want to use it for Time Machine backups. The drive will need to be formatted as Mac OS extended and the OS will prompt you to reformat it. Once set up it will back up the entire hard drive(except items you exclude , if any) and will then back up new or modified files every hour as long as the drive is connected.

You can activate Time Machine and go back to a specific date before you deleted that important document and restore just that document. It is very slick and works great, the only drawback is you cannot boot from the backup, but you can restore everything if the main hard drive fails.

If you want a bootable clone use Superduper or Carbon Copy Cloner. They will make exact clones of your HD on the external HD and it will be bootable. Both of them also have incremental backups after the initial full backup.

BTW - It's Mac not MAC. MAC stands for Media Access Control address. Completely different <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />

Sorry, pet peeve. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/laugh.gif" alt="" /> <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/laugh.gif" alt="" />