Using Leopard’s Time Machine With SuperDuper!

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!