denke
10-02-2006, 02:50 AM
It's been over two months since I last logged in here. That's because SD is working just great. It took a few days to get the Growl notification working just the way I want, but everything has been going like clockwork since then.
I bought a license for myself, which I use on my desktop and laptop. Once that was working, I got another license for my wife's desktop. Each desktop boots from a "sandbox" on its own (big) external Firewire drive. System updates are installed on the sandbox and tested there until I'm confident that everything is working okay. Then I install it on the actual internal drive of the desktop. No worries about system updates! What a relief!
Each desktop automatically does a Smart Update daily, alternating between two other partitions on its external FW drive. The backups happen in the wee hours, when we're usually both asleep. Growl puts up a little green notice when the copy is successful, which we see when we first wake up the computers for the day. I have instructed Growl to put up a little red notice if the copy is ever unsuccessful, but it's always succeeded so far.
With the iBook, I do manual backups. (Only when we're traveling does it actually get any new data of its own.)
This is a big improvement over Retrospect Desktop, which I was using before. It was always having problems of one sort or another. Once I'd get Retrospect working again, I was afraid to make any change for fear of breaking it. But SD is so clear, understandable, and predictable, that I have no such qualms. And SD makes non-propietary backups, which is far more reassuring than one big file in a proprietary format that cannot even be read without the application.
In summary, everything works great, just the way I want. I cannot recommend SD too highly. :D
Thanks, Dave (and Bruce)!
I bought a license for myself, which I use on my desktop and laptop. Once that was working, I got another license for my wife's desktop. Each desktop boots from a "sandbox" on its own (big) external Firewire drive. System updates are installed on the sandbox and tested there until I'm confident that everything is working okay. Then I install it on the actual internal drive of the desktop. No worries about system updates! What a relief!
Each desktop automatically does a Smart Update daily, alternating between two other partitions on its external FW drive. The backups happen in the wee hours, when we're usually both asleep. Growl puts up a little green notice when the copy is successful, which we see when we first wake up the computers for the day. I have instructed Growl to put up a little red notice if the copy is ever unsuccessful, but it's always succeeded so far.
With the iBook, I do manual backups. (Only when we're traveling does it actually get any new data of its own.)
This is a big improvement over Retrospect Desktop, which I was using before. It was always having problems of one sort or another. Once I'd get Retrospect working again, I was afraid to make any change for fear of breaking it. But SD is so clear, understandable, and predictable, that I have no such qualms. And SD makes non-propietary backups, which is far more reassuring than one big file in a proprietary format that cannot even be read without the application.
In summary, everything works great, just the way I want. I cannot recommend SD too highly. :D
Thanks, Dave (and Bruce)!