superduper vs. mac backup

[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!