Looking for overview pros/cons of using compressed/read-only DMG (for online backups)

[El_Flailey]

Originally Posted by dnanian

Other than the time, temporary space required, and fact that it can't be updated, there's no real downside to a read-only DMG.

But - you might want to consider a read/write sparse bundle instead. I'd expect Mozy to be able to back it up, including its inner 'band' files, and an updated bundle would likely be faster to back up than a whole new DMG.

Remember that if your external large FW 'archive' drive isn't backed up, well, all that stuff is vulnerable. And if you don't want to lose it, ever, it should be.

Wow, a reply that fast on Xmas eve no less. Granted I'm in the office too, but I'll contrast that with the "uninstall and reinstall this version that I just installed 20 minutes ago and told them that" style of tech support.

Thanks much. And sounds good, I'm about to do some traveling so I'll set this compressed DMG to finish uploading so I'm covered, and then maybe switch to sparse bundling from there. Mozy is also incremental they say, so perhaps I can speed the update process up with experimentation.

And yes PS my large external FW drive IS a backup. It's a collection of things that are all duplicated elsewhere. I also use it as a transport mechanism or scratch pad sometimes for huge audio/video files temporarily. But it's yet another backup itself.

I should have 5 copies of any given file: On the computer HD itself, its external HD (doubled two ways, both SD & TM partitions), then via online backup two ways (iDisk of user files & Mozy of DMG), and then a consolidated archive on that large external of key stuff updated every few weeks (and not deleted from its source).

Can you guess I've been traumatized?

Rumor has it that two years ago I had an incident where my laptop HD died a week before my wedding and killed all my notes/spreadsheets, contact info for all the guest/vendors, everything. I'm not planning on licking that flagpole again.

Anyways, thanks again and great product.
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