Need for Superduper w/ Lion Recovery?

[iThinkergoiMac]

No, that is not an incremental backup. It replaces the files on the backup if the source files have changed. So you can't go back and get an old version of a file. "Smart Update" is just a smart and fast image backup....

No, actually that's what incremental backups are. It backs up incrementally. What you're referring to is archiving previous versions, which is different. GGJ says it can do it, but I can't find it in the SD documentation (which is hard to navigate so no wonder).

Wikipedia's definition of incremental backup: "An incremental backup preserves data by not creating multiple copies that are based on the differences in those data: a successive copy of the data contains only that portion which has changed since the preceding copy has been created."

See? Nothing about preserving older versions, which is archiving.

 

[sidewinder]

No, that is not an incremental backup. It replaces the files on the backup if the source files have changed. So you can't go back and get an old version of a file. "Smart Update" is just a smart and fast image backup....

No, actually that's what incremental backups are. It backs up incrementally. What you're referring to is archiving previous versions, which is different. GGJ says it can do it, but I can't find it in the SD documentation (which is hard to navigate so no wonder).

Wikipedia's definition of incremental backup: "An incremental backup preserves data by not creating multiple copies that are based on the differences in those data: a successive copy of the data contains only that portion which has changed since the preceding copy has been created."

See? Nothing about preserving older versions, which is archiving.

No. Incremental backups make a full backup on the first run. Then each successive backup copies only the files that have changed from the last incremental backup. All the original files are in place. Typically, you can use incremental backups to restore to a certain point in time. To restore to the latest backup requires all the incremental backups to be in good order. No one makes incremental backup software today that does not allow you to restore to a certain point in time prior to the latest backup. This is done so you can recover from backing up bad data.

Look here:

http://www.backupcritic.com/software-buyer/differential-incremental.html

It would be stupid for incremental backup software to not allow access to the state of each incremental backup.

What SuperDuper! does is not an incremental backup. It does a full backup and then does smart checking to do a full image backup in the least amount of time. It never keeps multiple version of the same file. If a file has changed, it deletes it in the backup and replaces it with the latest version.

S-