Temporary backup solution.
 

Over the last month or so I have been popping in to look at these forums and to check the blog to see how SuperDuper's update was progressing. I'm happy to see its not far away and I have my fingers crossed in hope it will arrive for Christmas. Anyway, I hate being without an easy way to backup and I have found a compromise that I wanted to share with you as it might help some of you sort out your own temporary backup solution.

First, and most important, is the backup being bootable. For that I used Disk Utility's Restore tab to copy my internal drive to a partition on an external drive. The downside to this is that when it needs updating you have to erase it and copy the whole lot over again (the reason why we all love Smart Update). However, the system side of the internal (at least for me) doesn't change much on a day-to-day basis and so I only do this every few days at night time or after a big change that I want to keep.

My Home directory, which is constantly changing, I backup with Time Machine to another partition on the same external as above. I setup Time Machine to exclude the Applications, Library, and System directories (see here). When adding the System directory there is the option to "Exclude All System Files", I selected this, which excludes the (usually) hidden Unix files. It also says it will exclude the Applications directory too, I never had chance to test this but I found it did no harm manually selecting Applications and Library to sit along side in the "Do not back up:" list. This has the end result of backing up just the "/Users/" directory to the Time Machine partition.

To restore/recover you need to boot from the external and copy that back to the internal using Disk Utility. While still booted from the external, delete the "/Users/" directory on the internal and replace it with the same directory from the Time Machine partition found inside the "Latest" directory. Then just set the internal as the Startup Disk and job done.