Backing Up Your Data With Toast 8 Titanium

Posted: Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Backing up your data is one of the most important things you can do with your CD/DVD recorder, and Toast 8 Titanium offers several ways to keep your data safe. First, Toast 8 Titanium includes Déjà Vu, a powerful, yet easy-to-use program that helps you schedule automatic backups to a second hard drive, a network server, or to a blank CD or DVD. Second, you can use Toast's Volume Disc format to make an exact copy of a hard disk volume onto CD or DVD. Finally, for everyday quick-and-dirty backups or file transfers, you can of course just drag and drop selected files or folders into the Toast window and press the Record button. With all three methods, you can also use Toast 8 Titanium's unique ToastAnywhere feature to burn CDs and DVDs to networked recorders, a perfect solution for sharing a DVD recorder among multiple Macs on a network.

Backing Up with Déjà Vu

The Déjà Vu backup utility runs seamlessly in the background as a System Preference. With Déjà Vu, you can back up any number of folders manually at the click of a button, or automatically on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. Backups will take place even if you aren't logged in! If you forgot to check the option to install Déjà Vu along with Toast, you can add it later by rerunning the Setup Assistant from the Toast Help menu.

The three-step backup process could not be easier. Just select When (time), What (files & folders) and Where (destination drive), and you're done! Other powerful features of Déjà Vu include remote backup to networked servers, intelligent backup of changed files only, and folder synchronization. Read on for a complete tutorial on using Déjà Vu.

1) First, select the Déjà Vu pane from the System Preferences window. Then click the lock icon at the bottom left and enter your administrator password. This unlocks the features of the program. Also choose "Enable" from the drop-down menu at top left if not already selected.

Make sure Déjà Vu is enabled and unlocked before starting to create backup schedules.

2) Next, select folders or files you want to back up by double-clicking "Choose folder or disk" under the What heading. Keep adding folders to back up by clicking on the plus sign at lower right. If you want to make a "clone" or exact copy of your entire hard disk, select your system drive icon instead of a folder.

Backing up in Déjà Vu is a simple matter of choosing What, When and Where.

3) Then decide how often you want to back up each file or folder in your list by choosing Daily, Weekly or Monthly under the When heading. You can also specify exact times for your backups by clicking the Options button at lower right, then choosing the Schedules tab.

Change the default time for your daily, weekly or monthly backups in the Schedules Options pane.

4) Finally, choose the destination for your backup, the folder where files should be saved, under the Where heading. This can be any drive available at backup time, from external hard drives to networked servers to CD and DVD recorders. You can even back up to the unused hard disk space on your iPod if it's plugged in. Déjà Vu will check to see that the drive is available, and that there's enough space to complete the backup. If you are making a clone of your entire hard drive, be sure to reformat (erase) the destination drive (as Mac OS Extended) just before cloning. Also check off "Repair Disk Permissions" and uncheck "Remote Backup" in the General Options pane. If your destination drive is a remote server, enter a username and password (if needed) for the server in the Auto-Connect Options pane.

Déjà Vu's General Options pane has several useful settings.

5) Now your backups are ready to go! Automatic backups will occur at the scheduled time, provided the destination drive is available. Or if you want to backup manually, click the Backup button at lower right to start the process. All items that say "Manually" and are checked off in the left-hand column will be backed up immediately to the selected destination. If you are backing up for the first time, do a manual backup and check to be sure everything went okay. Then future backups can be performed according to a schedule.

Note that you don't have to be logged in for scheduled backups to take place, but they will not occur if your machine is sleeping. You may want to change your Energy Saver preference to prevent this from happening. Be sure to click the Schedule button again each time you change any options or add any new files/folders to the back-up list.

6) If you're backing up to CD or DVD, you can also take advantage of Toast 8's data compression and encryption features, which let you fit up to fifty percent more on your data discs. And with 128-bit encryption and password protection, you can be sure that your data is secure from prying eyes. To use either feature, simply select the Compressed or Encrypted option from the disc settings drawer before burning. Note that these options are available for "Mac only" data discs-not Mac/PC hybrids.

Decompressing or decrypting is even easier. These two functions are built right into OS X and no special software is needed, not even Toast. All you need is the password you selected when burning your encrypted disc.

7) That's all you need to know to use Déjà Vu! But there are a couple more cool features you might want to take advantage of. If you regularly backup one folder to another, you can use folder synchronization to delete items in the destination folder that no longer exist in the source folder. To use this feature, just check the "Mirror Folder Contents" box in the General Options pane. Note that this synchronization is one-way. It will make the destination folder look just like the source folder, but not the other way around.

Another handy feature is the Safety Net option, which archives changed and/or deleted files in a special Safety Net folder (within your Documents folder by default). You can specify as many archived versions as you like, so that you can backtrack to a version from a week or a month ago. The Index file in the Safety Net folder provides a full list of all archived files. (Note that Safety Net does not work if the entire startup disk is selected as the source. Instead, add the individual folders that you want Safety Net to archive as separate items in the backup list.)

Déjà Vu's Safety Net feature lets you keep multiple versions of files so you can backtrack to a particular point in time.

Using Mac Volume Recording

One of Toast's unique and useful features is the ability to burn entire Mac volumes to CD or DVD. What this means is that you can make an exact image of a hard disk volume, including the visual appearance of the desktop (file and folder arrangement, icons, and all). This lets you control exactly what is seen when your disc is inserted.

This feature is perfect for publishing discs for other Mac owners (although Windows users won't be able to read Mac volume discs without a utility like MacDrive). It's also great for making personal backups of smallish hard disk volumes (up to 50GB with a Blu-ray Disc).

Here's how to record a disc in Mac Volume format (Mac OS standard HFS) with Toast 8 Titanium:

1) First, prepare your source volume exactly as you want it to appear on your CD or DVD. (If you don't already have a physical hard disk volume ready, you can use the Toast Utility menu to create a temporary partition for your project. You can also create permanent partitions with the Mac Disk Utility. Choose Mac OS Extended for OS X volumes.) Note that you can't use Volume format to create bootable discs, and that File Sharing must be turned off on volumes you want to copy.

2) Next, choose the Mac Volume project under the Data button (if you don't see it, check the box to "Show Legacy Settings" in the Toast Preferences).

Toast's Mac Volume recording option tells you which disks can be burned as CD or DVDs.

3) Then drag the volume you want to copy into the Toast window from the desktop, or click the Select button to choose it. You can only select volumes with the comment "ok to write." Optimize-on-the-fly, which defragments files as they are copied, is turned on by default. You can turn it off if desired in the selection dialog.

4) Click the Record button, insert a blank disc, and you're done!

Using ToastAnywhere

Toast 8 Titanium's ToastAnywhere feature lets you share CD and DVD recorders over a network (or the Internet), so you can back up even if you don't have a CD or DVD recorder connected to your Mac. It's a perfect solution for small offices, schools, and home networks to share expensive resources.

Here's how it works: both the sending and receiving computers need Toast 8 Titanium installed, and the receiving computer must turn on "ToastAnywhere Recorder Sharing" in the Toast 8 Preferences to share their recorder with other Toast 8 Titanium users on the network. From there, the process is simple. As the sender, you set up the disc you want to burn in Toast just like you normally would, then select the shared recorder from the pop-up list when you click the Recorder Options button. To access a recorder on the Internet, choose "Other Shared Recorder," then enter the IP address of the remote machine (you may also need to adjust firewall and port settings). Finally, click the red Record button.

Share your CD or DVD recorder over a network by turning on the ToastAnywhere feature in the Toast Preferences window.

That's it! The person sharing their recorder will be prompted to insert a blank disc, and Toast will then record your content to disc over the network. Of course, Toast must be open on the remote machine.