SuperDuper, Time Machine and backup strategies

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 06 February 2008 08:15

Opinion and Analysis

The arrival of a Leopard-compatible version of SuperDuper was no doubt accompanied by sighs of relief by those who have been waiting for it since Mac OS X 10.5's debut.

Falling prices for hard drives mean disk-to-disk backup is financially viable for growing numbers of users. While Time Machine does provide a mechanism for doing a complete restore by booting from a Leopard installer DVD, a bootable backup will get you up and running again more quickly if disaster does strike.

But I'm not convinced that a nightly cloning provides adequate backup. It's great for disaster recovery (especially if you have a mechanism to protect the files that change during the day), but there's just too much risk that you won't notice a problem until after you've cloned the main drive, overwriting the previous clone in the process. While drives are a lot cheaper than they used to be, I don't think many people are ready to buy five (or seven) drives so they can use them in a weekly rotation.

I do like Shirt Pocket's idea of using SuperDuper alongside Time Machine. That way you get the reassurance of a bootable drive if the worst happens, plus the ability to easily restore the last-known-good version of an accidentally deleted, incorrectly modified, or mysteriously corrupted file.

You're going to need a large hard drive for the job. We tend to fill disks rapidly these days, so if you're running a 320G hard disk (as provided on two of the four standard iMacs configurations), you'll probably find at least 200G occupied after using it for a while. You will therefore need 400G just to start using SuperDuper and Time Machine, which means a 500G drive will soon fill and a 750G unit will be a better idea.

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