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Old 12-24-2009, 01:36 PM
El_Flailey El_Flailey is offline
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Join Date: Aug 2009
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Looking for overview pros/cons of using compressed/read-only DMG (for online backups)

So I've been using SuperDuper for awhile now and first off I have to say how pleased I am. It's an amazing product. I have gotten very serious about backing up this year (multiple/redundant) due to tons of travel and so much important stuff on a little laptop.

Of all the various solutions I've sampled (Apple's Backup, X5, Time Machine, Mozy, iDisk, and of course SD) this is the only one that basically does exactly what it said it was going to do from the beginning without lots of tweaking. some of the ones I mentioned are just useless, others required a LOT of fairly tech-savvy tweaking to make them useful.

So that out of the way, I've searched but not found a good summary of this outside what's in the manual, so forgive the length of the post but my topic question is....

What are the main pros/cons of using a compressed read-only DMG backup?

Clearly it takes longer and can't do incremental updates, that doesn't bother me for the specific use case I have in mind.

But to refine the question -- is there anything about a read-only DMG that should make me nervous when I'm using it as a way to clone an entire machine and store it off site via online backup?

My specific case: I have been using Mozy for online backup, it's buggy as hell and annoying. But it's cheap and aside from CrashPlan (which I might need to consider) I've tried the competition and they're no better.

After experimenting it seems like Mozy's biggest freakout problem is that it just doesn't like backing up an entire hard drive from the root folder. And what I've been trying to do is use SuperDuper to clone my HD to a FireWire external partition, then use Mozy and specify that partition for backup so I have remote/online redundancy. It just doesn't work.

Now if I do 20-30gb+ by choosing the users folder and subfolders it's slow but it works. I have never been able to get it to take the entire partition.

So here's my current kludge -- I have a lot of space on my the main HD (about 25% full). So I did my normal "all files" backup to the external via SD. Simple as always. Then I decided to backup the external via SD back to my primary HD and specify it as a DMG. I chose read-only compression as shaving a few gigs off the file size will save days for my initial backup. I'm still only backed up within the building which scares me.

Then I tell Mozy to just back up that one DMG as a single file. Since Mozy's biggest bugginess is dealing with 100,000+ files it seems, this appears to be working, slowly.

So, I swear there's actual questions here. How about:

1. Is there any obvious reason why a compressed read-only DMG copied to an online backup source would turn out not to work when it counts. Assuming there's a disaster but I get that DMG back, I should have no problems creating a bootable clone from it, correct?

2. More generally, does this seem like a reasonable solution to my problem? Any advantages to using a sparse bundle? The SD backup time is measured in hours, and the Mozy time measured in weeks, so speeding the SD backup isn't a huge concern. But am I missing something?

And, for reference, I have:

- Desktop iMac
- Laptop Macbook

All of these backup solutions:

- A MobileMe account, which I sync to docs folder and similar nightly for instant access to any given file if there's a crash/loss. I use Personal Backup X5 for this.

- External FireWire HDs for both computers, each with two partitions. One partition is the SD clone, the other is Time Machine.

- A third and much larger external FW drive that I use to archive stuff that I really don't feel like losing, ever.

- A MozyHome unlimited subscription for both machines. I have still never gotten this to work in a way I'm happy with. Hence this post.


If you read this far, thanks! And any advice/feedback/links appreciated, no need to respond to every single thing I brought up, any quick pointers will be of help. And congrats on a great product, I recommend it to everyone.
________
MAZDA RX-2
________
Mary jane

Last edited by El_Flailey; 03-16-2011 at 06:40 PM.
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