I’m a serial backer upper. Losing files on my Mac ranks up there with a dime-sized zit on my nose when I’m in a wedding party. I don’t like to lose files. Mac OS X Leopard’s Time Machine is a very handy back up utility, but I rely on SuperDuper! as the first leg in my trinity of back up options. What do I do that’s special?
I have an iMac in the office, and take my MacBook Pro everywhere else, including home. Much of what I do on both each day is for business, so the safety of my files is critical.
Both Macs have a few thousand songs in iTunes, many thousand more photos in iPhoto and Aperture, and many, many thousand more files, documents, spreadsheets, email, movies, and a graphics library.
With all those files bouncing between two machines, my track record for not losing a file is good. For the last few years I’ve used a combination of SuperDuper! and ChronoSync to backup files between my Macs, and to external hard drives.
It’s a rather straightforward process. I use ChronoSync to back up files between the Macs, and SuperDuper! to clone each Mac. That’s one leg of my newfound trinity of backup steps.
The second leg has been to burn critical files to a DVD and get them out of the office and out of my home, sometimes for safe keeping at my parent’s home, other times to a safe deposit box (depends on which way I’m going at the time). The DVD back up routine isn’t as frequent, but may be the best option in case of a catastrophic disaster.
The most recent leg to attach itself to my trinity of backup steps is Leopard’s Time Machine. With two Macs that required the purchase of a couple of more external hard drives. One for the MacBook Pro, one for the office iMac.
After using Time Machine for six months I’ve become more accustomed to the single most obvious quirk I’ve encountered with a new Mac utility. I don’t have to do anything. It just works, grinding away every hour, backing up whatever has changed on both my Macs.
I’ve also had cause to test Time Machine to see if it really has files I’ve stored, then deleted. Amazingly, Time Machine finds my files and stores my files. In fact, Time Machine may be a bit too good, as it stores every email message that comes in, whether I want it to or not.
Some of my email and replies probably should not be saved, but that’s not a major issue. The law isn’t knocking on my door asking to peek at my email. Yet.
So, how does Time Machine peacefully coexist with the ultra dependable SuperDuper!? SuperDuper! is used daily to make incremental backups, usually toward the end of the day. Multiple times during the day I’ve copied files from one Mac to another or to an external drive using ChronoSync.
SuperDuper! makes a bootable clone, not a feature available in ChronoSync or Time Machine. That means recovering from a disaster or a broken Mac, the ultimate disaster, is merely a matter of plugging in the external hard drive to another Mac, and restarting.
SuperDuper! also backs up my Time Machine hard drive, both in the office and at home. Let me repeat that—SuperDuper! actually backs up a Time Machine hard drive. The beauty of that is that Time Machine does something good that SuperDuper! and ChronoSync don’t—hourly back ups of changed files, while I do nothing.
That means that Time Machine has a different value—the ability to find a recently lost or the original of a changed file. Spotlight can do something similar with a SuperDuper! drive attached to the Mac, but Time Machine’s ability to capture the old file, nearly instantaneously, is even better.
It’s simple, but it’s three steps. Hourly back ups with Time Machine. Daily back ups to an external drive with SuperDuper!, on both the Mac’s hard drives, and the Time Machine hard drives, with ChronoSync copies of critical files during the day. Finally, the ever handy, and soon to be outmoded copy to a DVD.
That brings me to the future. I’ve been testing Amazon’s S3, Simple Storage Service, for online back ups. I can store gigabytes of files for just a few dollars a month. The backup process is more cumbersome than either SuperDuper! or Time Machine, but it means yet another off site location to store critical files.
I suspect that off site storage of files will become more common for Mac users, so I’m getting my toes wet.
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Reader Comments (8)
Jan Kang said:
Time Machine is good for what it does, which is give you quick and easy to find incremental backup of recent files. I clean my Time Machine hard disk drive about every 6 months and start over.
Love ChronoSync. Love SuperDuper! Love Kate, too.
Dan said:
Wow! A Little overkill here, I would say. Just back up your critical files once or twice a day using Chronosync. Clone your computer with SuperDuper once a week. That’ll do it. Time Machine is slick, but proven to be unreliable. I dumped it from my backup plan a while ago.
Kantu Kannan said:
A backup system can reach a point of ‘diminishing returns’ very quickly. It depends on the value of your files, and how quickly you want to be up and running when your Mac or hard drive fails. It’s all about managing the process of creating redundancy, and how many hard drives and upload locations you can afford and manage comfortably.
I use SuperDuper to clone my Mac to two different hard drives, and I upload critical files to 1) Amazon S3 for safety off premise, 2) to DVD which I save off premise.
It only takes a couple of hours to rebuild my Mac from scratch so that’s less of an issue than protecting critical files which include music, photos, documents.
Y L Shin said:
I have just switched from Windows to Macs about two months ago.
I have a 1TB Ext HDD which I have three partitions of which I use two for Time Machine and SuperDuper respectively. Time Machine runs automatically and I do an update using SuperDuper every other day as I am not generating a lot of new files at the moment (still in an experimenting stage). I have a lot of older files which I am transferring to another 300GB external HDD, a little at a time which is then uploaded to Mozy (otherwise I will not be able to use my iMac due to the slow upload). And I thought that I am backing up to absurdity.
Dan Winston said:
I can only assume that SuperDuper backing up a Time Machine volume is for redundancy. Better safe than sorry. I use SuperDuper to back up an internal drive in my creaking G5, and to back up to an external Firewire drive. Time Machine is backed up to yet another external Firewire drive. Then I copy critical files to an offsite location. That’s more than enough to cover dead hard drives or a mini-catastrophe.
It’s impossible to defeat Murphy’s Law, so I try to be reasonable with regular backups.
Early Adopter said:
I also use SuperDuper, Time Machine and ChronoSync for backup and understand all the differences among them. What I don’t get is the utility of using SuperDuper to copy your TimeMachine backup. Is Time Machine redundancy the point? In that case you could just have two Time Machine drives. But apart from redundancy I can’t see the advantage.
Thanks.
Kate MacKenzie said:
I have an Amazon S3 account and have some files loaded there. Also tried out Jungle Disk and have tested a few other online backup systems (though not Elephant Drive). All seem to have issues with permissions, though on most files, that should not be a problem. I’ve been using Panic’s Transmit FTP to upload files to Amazon. It’s hard to beat their price tag. SuperDuper! only syncs with other Mac volumes, so it isn’t a viable choice for online backups. Yet. I expect this to be an industry that grows steadily for years.
Rob said:
Great article, summarized what my research had led me to think I would be doing for local backups on my new mac - just ditched windows. Very interested to hear how you get on with your online backup tests.
I’ve been looking at JungleDisk and ElephantDrive and wondered how you had found it fitting in with your backup scheme above. Like both of the above due to S3.
I’d read that JungleDisk use of WebDav means that permissions and things are not retained for true backups. Not sure that this is a big issue for me though.
Also I was wondering if you have successfully used SuperDuper with with either of these solutions or any other online backup solution for that matter.
Thanks again for great backup summary!