I've got an external drive, and was wondering if there was any particular software package I should use to run regular backups. I think windows XP has something built in, but I am hesitant to use it for some reason. Thoughts?

 

If you want to spend money, Acronis True Image is pretty good. http://www.acronis.com/

 

What about for a mac?

 

I don't mind spending a little money, but honestly my preference would be some free utility, if such a thing exists.

 

Also, incremental backups is a must. I dont want to have to backup my entire hard drive every time.

 

I use a corporate version.

But for me it was free as I work for the company that writes it.

 

I'm pretty sure Acronis True Image can do incremental backups.

 

Meh...just use the Windows Backup. Otherwise you'll end up spending too much and use too few of the features.

 

Backup only stuff that can't be recovered such as photos, documents, etc.

 

Some i've looked at are:

acronis true image
r-drive image 4.0
paragon drive backup 8.5

Been a while but with the versions I saw, I think all of these offer real time backups meaning you could snap a full drive image without even rebooting your computer.

 

I was looking for a utility like this too.

I want to back up everything on my computer to where I can boot from it if necessary.

 

This is practically a RAID 1 solution. At that point, there's really no reason for a home user to run backups on a RAID 1, except on the most important things (but you can just replicate that stuff to another computer, if anything).

 

I use Acronis True Image also.

 

Same here, I added it to task manager so it does it automatically every 2 weeks. I picked what files I want to backup.

I

 

SubRosaSoft.com's CopyCatX is the best drive duplication product around. It uses block-copying instead of file-copying so it's faster then other products. CopyCatX can also recover data from a failing drive or one with bad blocks. Try that with other products (including Disk Utility) and they will fail. It'll even allow you to recover data from a drive that won't mount. I've used it many times on client's drives that refuse to mount, drives that are starting to do the click of death, and use it to make exact duplicates of drives (it's the only product that I've seen that can copy a drive including the Boot Camp partition on an Intel Mac.