You must be logged on your machine as an administrator before you can back up data. If you don't know whether or not you have administrative access on your machine, please speak with an IT Staff member or send an email to design_help@ncsu.edu.

Before backing up any data, please be sure that you QUIT and NOT CLOSE all open applications. Clicking on the red dot in the left corner of a window only closes the window. It does not QUIT the application. You can tell if you have applications running by looking down on the dock. If any icon has a black triangle under it, that means the applicaiton is still running.

There are two ways to quit an application in OS X. The first is to click on the application name in the top left hand corner of the screen, which is right beside the blue apple logo, as shown below.

The second way is to right click (or Ctrl+click) the application icon in the dock and select Quit, as shown below.

If you are running anything lower than Mac OS 10.4, the only icon on the dock that should have a black triangle under should be the Finder, which looks like this:

If you are running OS 10.4 or above, then only the Finder and Dashboard should be running. The Dashboard icon looks like this:

If you are unsure what version of Mac OS you are running, click on the blue Apple logo in the upper left corner of your screen and then click on About This Mac, as shown below:

An information window will appear. Look under the big silver Apple logo and under the Mac OS X lettering. You will see, in grey text, Version 10.x.x, as shown below: