The Mac Chronicles
SuperDuper!
I classify backups into three categories:
- Bootable full backup
- Local backup of user files
- Offsite backup of user files
I was doing a decent job of the two user file backups under Windows, but the bootable full backup was a different story.
I used Norton Ghost to back up my Windows main drive to a backup drive. The version of Ghost I was using didn’t do hot backups while the system was live; rather, it took the system down to a custom DOS program while the backup ran. And ran. And ran.
The thing took forever, and the system was unusable during the multi-hour process. As a result, I seldom did full backups like this. It was fortunate that the main drive was a RAID, since my backups were always out of date.
I resolved to do a better job on the shiny new Mac Pro. Given my past experience, it was evident to me that I needed a backup utility that:
- produced bootable full backups
- ran in a reasonable amount of time
- was completely reliable
- could run while the system was up
- could be automated, so it could be used every day
Requirements in hand; off to Google for some research. Some poking around revealed two excellent posts on the plasticsfuture blog:
These are both epic posts, with excellent commentary. You could spend days following up on all the pointers provided therein, and I did — I must have tested nearly every backup product available.
And, as with many others, I settled on SuperDuper! as my weapon of choice. It’s simple, fast, reliable, produces bootable hot backups, and can be scheduled to run automatically. The vendor provides a free version which will, under manual control, clone a drive; one couldn’t ask for a much better trial than this. For $27.95 USD, scheduling, incremental backups, and other features are unlocked.
My system now performs an incremental bootable clone every morning at 3 am, without intervention, utterly reliably, in very little time, for about one-third the cost of a comparable Windows cloning utility.
I’m really starting to love this platform.