Best Backup Software?

[agentphish]

I'm looking for opinions on what the best backup software is for my mac. Price is no object. I have an 80 gig drive which i wish to backup to my external 120gb drive. I need to back up everything, and have it be able to be completely restored with ease to this 80 gb drive in the event of emergency.

Thanks

 

[edesignuk]

SuperDuper! You can't go wrong.

 

[Applespider]

Seconded. To do complete backups, it's free to use. If you want to do incremental backups (only updates what's changed since last time), you have to pay but it does knock a lot of time off the process!

It talks you through what it's about to do but does make it very easy to create a clone of your HD that you'll be able to boot up from (via Firewire) and restore through Disk Utility should there ever be a problem.

 

[agentphish]

excellent. Thank you.

 

[robbieduncan]

SuperDuper! You can't go wrong.

Another vote for this and an external FW harddrive.

 

[agentphish]

how would you guys compare superduper! to carboncopycloner?

 

[edesignuk]

how would you guys compare superduper! to carboncopycloner?

It's the simplicity and smart updates (with the registered version - where by only new/changed files are backed up after a first full backup) that wins it for SuperDuper.

 

[Applespider]

how would you guys compare superduper! to carboncopycloner?

Better interface since it tells you what it's doing. And Superduper is still in development. I don't think CCC has been updated for a while (at least last time I checked) although pre-Superduper, I suspect it would have been what you were recommended.

 

[iEdd]

I have superduper and registered it for the smart update. Definitely worth it. A new version with a new interface came out recently. If you are backing up an 80GB to a 120GB, first partition the 120 into a 40GB and an 80GB. That way you can make the 80 a bootable, and have the 40 as a little bit of scratch disk or for backing up something else. iPod backup?

 

[agentphish]

sounds good I'll try the free version
thanks

 

[dogbone]

Looks great,

<off topic>

However after being thoroughly convinced that Defragging was unnecessary on OSX 10.4 I find that there is a recommendation from SuperDuper to check out iDefrag.

What's that all about then. either OSX does or doesn't need defragging. Which is it.

 

[agentphish]

hmm... I've got one small problem w/ superduper... I use the external drive to back up some files on my windows machine as well... thus the drive is formatted for FAT32 and superduper wont support it.

Suggestions?

 

[hkriffraff]

I am using La Cie's free Silverkeeper program with an external Iomega hard disk. It seems to be doing smart updates (since the second backup didn't take as long as the first). Is there any advantage offered by Supderduper?

 

[Applespider]

hmm... I've got one small problem w/ superduper... I use the external drive to back up some files on my windows machine as well... thus the drive is formatted for FAT32 and superduper wont support it.

If you want a bootable backup, you won't be able to have it formatted FAT32.

Can you partition your drive so you have an 80GB HFS+ section and a 40GB FAT32 section?

 

[agentphish]

applespider, how might I be able to format the drive as both HFS+ and FAT32? Didn't think that could be done.

 

[Applespider]

Have a read through this hint on macosxhints. There are a variety of ways to do it apparently. I haven't had to do it personally so not sure which would work best