In the last article we talked about preparing yourself for setting up a new Mac. Actually, if you are taking care of your files and disk images, you will always be ready to set up a new Mac. It might be worth noting that a few weeks ago I managed (while trying to do something clever) damage my Mac’s files to the point where it wouldn’t startup properly. Now, I’m not suggesting you start to mess with your Mac’s system files to test my theory, but the moral of my particular story is that although I was a little annoyed  with having messed up my Mac, I was able to get it back and running in less than an hour.

Have a good backup plan. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve preached that on Macstarter. So I’ll preach it again. Backup. And keep doing it. Time Machine will take care of most of your needs. Carbon Copy Cloner will certainly do a good job. So, in order to get yourself prepared, and in order to have a Toolkit handy, your backups have to be up to date. As a rule, I do the following:

• Backup all my Photos and MP3′s and Movies using Carbon Copy Cloner. This suits me as Time Machine would just take way too much space backing these things up.
• Time Machine Backs up my Desktop, Documents and other folders (but not my Music and Photos).
• All my work files are saved on Dropbox. This serves as a double advantage for me. As I have Dropbox installed on all the machines (3), I never have to worry about emailing work to myself. If I use an “alien” machine along the way, I can simply pick up my files from Dropbox.com

That takes care of my personal files. At any time, if my laptop was to spontaneously combust before my eyes, I would have a backup of everything. My most vital files would be saved online, so I would be able to get them from any computer in the world.

The second stage of getting your toolkit together is to make disk images of your software disks. Make sure you have a Lion installer disk. Or a Snow Leopard disk image. And so on. Get all your disks, and create disk images. Then throw all of those images onto an external hard drive. And then keep that hard drive safe. Now when it comes to installing software, you’ll notice that it’s amazingly fast to install from disk images, rather than a CD or a DVD.

And that’s going to the be the basis of your toolkit. That’s the meat and potatoes of getting your Mac (new or old) up and running. This is something you should do as standard. So, if you’re not doing the above, do yourselves a favour and read this article again. And then do what it says….