superduper vs. mac backup

[boblaker]

Dave--

Greetings from South Carolina.

You are all over the place--have been reading lots about SuperDuper recently and I am very interested.

Backups and cloning are confusing to me.

Currently I backup my iMac to an external HD using the mac backup utility (and back up my powerbook to a separate OWC external HD using same).

My questions are:

1) does superduper take the place of backup?
2) or is it something that I could (should) use in addition to backup (to provide a bootable copy)
3) If the latter do I need to partition the external drives (I'm not a techie so don't know how to do this).

Many thanks

Scott

[dnanian]

Hi, Scott. Glad you're reading about us!

Let me try to answer your questions.

The .mac/Apple backup utility backs up your personal files, but doesn't make a bootable backup. Instead, it makes a "classic" historical backup, with incremental additions. That's pretty good if you feel you're going to need to roll back over and over, but in the event of a disaster, it's really hard to recover.

SuperDuper! make (and updates) a fully bootable backup. This doesn't have to replace your user of Apple Backup, but it makes an excellent supplement, and may indeed be everything you need.

What I'd do is use Disk Utility to partition the drives into a "Backup" partition and a "data" partition that you can use for whatever else. (This is really easy to do: just run Disk Utility, select the drive, and choose the "partition" tab. The rest is pretty self-explanatory.)

The "Backup" partition should be large enough to hold the internal drive (or, at least, as large as you expect to take up). Do this for each drive.

Then, you're just going to use SuperDuper! to back up the appropriate machine to the appropriate partition. The first time, you can do this with Erase, then copy; subsequent executions should be with "Smart Update". I think you'll be very pleased with how fast it works!

[boblaker]

Thanks!

I'll be buying today!

[dnanian]

Great! Thanks for your support!

[rollytan]

i'm currently researching backup programs that will backup mac to offsite server. only one so far is www.disksave.com

not sure of ibackup having on yet or not. anyone know of some others?

[pwg]

What I'd really like is to have 2 partitions on my reserve drive:
1. Clone maintained by e.g. smartupdate daily.
2. Backup partition - whenever smartupdate either updates or deletes a file, the previous version is copied to this partition, with a version number. If this could then keep say the previous 3 versions, I'd have a great recovery tool for mistakes as well as disasters!

Any chance?

thanks,

Peter.

[dnanian]

There's always a chance, Peter. But given that Time Machine is going to focus on that "temporal rollback" use case, a combination of it and us will likely be exactly what you're looking for...

[MMM]

Don't forget that if you’re using FileVault, you should create a non-FileVault account for use with SuperDuper!