When you first set up the plan for your home folder, it's set to the default settings: a daily backup to your Mac's internal hard drive, and a monthly backup to a CD or DVD. You can edit these settings to your liking.

One setting you'll definitely want to change is the destination of your daily backup. You don't want it to reside on your Mac's internal drive--keep it on an external drive. So let's change this setting. (If you have enough space on your iDisk, you can use it for your backup, but saving to cloud storage can be time consuming.)

Under the Destination And Schedule section, you'll see entries for the daily and monthly backup. To change the daily backup location, double-click the daily entry. Under Choose A Destination, click on the pop-up menu for Destination, and you can select another storage device, such as an external hard drive, or even your iDisk. Click on the Folder pop-up menu, and you can create a new folder on your destination drive that will be the location for the actual backup data.

Modify plan settings

Under Choose A Schedule, click the Back Up pop-up menu, and select how frequently the back up should occur. The Keep pop-up menu tells the software how long it should keep older backups.