Like many users, I make mistakes when working with my computer. Some of them are easy to recover from (the Undo command is made more powerful every day). Some are not, like when you’re trying to clean up hard drive space with the Unix ‘find’ command. Let’s just say that you should always use the ‘-print0’ flag when trying to run ‘find’ results through ‘rm’.
Anyway, due to some major carelessness, I managed to delete a large chunk of my iTunes music library. Not good, particularly when I’m not even sure how I got some of those rare mp3s in the first place. Fortunately, I am a regular user of Carbon Copy Cloner by Bombich Software.
This nifty bit of Mac donationware keeps me alive with a bootable backup of my entire harddrive on an external USB drive. One of the main selling points of CCC is that it preserves metadata. This is very important because a lot of software (including the operating system) need this metadata in order to function correctly. It can also do backup schedules, incremental backups, and a host of other nifty options.
For those of you not currently backing up your software, I highly recommend the practice. For those of you who are looking for a good backup product for the Mac, I recommend Carbon Copy Cloner. It’s donationware, and regularly maintained.