SuperDuper, Time Machine and backup strategies

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 06 February 2008 08:15

Opinion and Analysis

Even then, there are still issues. If your using one or more applications that create very large files that are frequently updated - Entourage is a prime example - you may want to exclude those files from Time Machine to prevent the storage requirement blowing out or causing the premature deletion of your oldest backups. A 2G file backed up once an hour probably requires 400G per month, severely curtailing the usefulness of Time Machine.

If email is as important to you as it is to me, you'll want more than just a single daily clone as backup. If you can't run to multiple external drives, it's hard to find a better answer than copying those files to removable media. DVD-RW as a capacity of over 4G, and anyone can afford enough of them to allow a weekly or even monthly recycling.

And don't forget the difference between backing up and archiving. Backup is to protect files that you're currently using; archiving is intended to preserve files that you don't need at the moment but might require again at some unspecified future time. A good archiving regime can help reduce the amount of data you need to back up or may provide space for other uses, but all those largish media files (photos, music, videos) that you want to keep online probably means you won't see much benefit on the typical Mac.