will SuperDuper work for my requirements?

[jchou]

I've been researching a backup solution, and SuperDuper looks like a very strong contender. Having read the FAQ's, though, I had a question about whether it will work for my requirements. In brief, I would like to:

1) back up 3 separate Mac's to an external hard drive (I'm planning on buying a new hard drive)

2) use that SAME hard drive to transfer files to and from a PC at work

3) it isn't too important that the backups be bootable, so long as worst-case scenario data recovery is workable.

From reading the FAQ, it seems the best way to do this would be to manually create image files on the backup destination hard drive, one for each Mac I want to backup.

However, there was also the FAQ about SuperDuper not recognizing destination hard drives that are FAT32. Will this be a problem?

- if I format the hard drive HFS+, then will I be unable to use it for the PC file transfers?

- if I format it FAT32, will I be unable to use SuperDuper?

Thanks for any insight.

Joe

[dnanian]

Hi, Joe.

If you want to use the same drive, you will indeed need to use sparse images, stored on the drive, as described in this FAQ:

http://www.shirt-pocket.com/forums/showthread.php?t=81

SuperDuper! will recognize the drive as FAT32 for storing *images* on, it just won't clone directly to it. So, the method in the FAQ will work. PC won't see an HFS+ drive, so that definitely will not work for you.

Hope that answers the question...