is TUAW right ?

[arnaud]

Hello everyone, Hello Dave

I'm sure you already saw that post on TUAW (http://feeds.tuaw.com/~r/weblogsinc/tuaw/~3/19238090/), but I have doubts.
Do they describe correctly, with the right words, what they did with SD ?

Now it's time for SuperDuper! to do its magic. If you're unfamiliar, SuperDuper! is a utility that can make bootable clones of a machine's hard drive, and update them incrementally. So, I had SuperDuper! update the damaged iBook's backup drive with its internal volume's current state (which only took a few minutes, thanks to smart backups). Next, I told SuperDuper! to clone the now up-to-date external drive to the 2nd iBook's hard drive, which is just like physically moving the drive, but without all the mess. A short time later (all right, a long time, but I was at work, so it's OK), the working iBook had been turned into a mirror image of its damaged counterpart, all of the important files had been saved

smart update = incremental ?

Even though any publicity is good :)

[dnanian]

It depends on what you mean by "incremental", Arnaud. Yes, it makes only the changes necessary to make the destination once again exactly resemble the selections from the source, so they were made "incrementally"...

[arnaud]

Ok.
Because it seems that other apps consider "incremental" means keeping each version of a folder.
Intego BackUp works that way I believe, and obviously Leopard Time Machine will work "incrementally".

On the Intego booth a few years ago at the Apple Expo, one of their guys explained to me what was the difference between "smart update" and "incremental", so I believe there WAS a difference :)

[dnanian]

Again, it depends on how a given company is using the term. We avoided "incremental" and "differential" because they're confusing, geeky terms that have multiple meanings...

[arnaud]

And you were wise to do so :)

[dnanian]

Well, I thought so. But I've been wrong before! ;)