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SuperDuper or Time Machine?

Benguitar

Benguitar

Guest
Original poster
Jan 30, 2009
1,253
1
I have a quick question about backing up my MacBook. I have been backing it up with a Lacie All Terrain Drive using the software SuperDuper the only reason I use SuperDuper is because I was told that you cannot boot up from a Time Machine Backup? I don't 100% know why it is important to be able to boot up from a external drive? So anyway lately I have had this fear of my hard drive crashing and my backup being "corrupt" or "un-readable."

Does anyone have any suggestions on what settings to put in my SuperDuper or if I should just dump SuperDuper totally, erase my external drive and back up from Time Machine?


-Ben
 
Both are good solutions (TM and SuperDuper)

Time Machine - does incremental backups and lets you go back in time to find things that you may have deleted or that may have been corrupted, and lets you restore your system in total, BUT you cannot boot from it.

SuperDuper - makes a bootable clone of your setup at that time and it is bootable, allowing you to be up and running in an instant... and depending on how often you clone, you can be right back where you were, booted and running. But, you cannot go back in time to get things that you may have deleted, and if your system is corrupt when cloned, well your clone is corrupt too.

I do both (although I use Carbon Copy Cloner). I have my external partitioned and have TM on one and my clone on the other. They both have their pros and cons.

Woof, Woof - Dawg
pawprint.gif
 
Benguitar said:
Does anyone have any suggestions on what settings to put in my SuperDuper or if I should just dump SuperDuper totally, erase my external drive and back up from Time Machine?
Click to expand...

I don't see how that solves your problem, because your drive can go bad no matter what you're using as a backup system.

I have two drives; 1 is a bootable back up with SuperDuper, the other is for TM. The advantage of a bootable backup is that if your hard drive totally fails you can use your backup in its place immediately by selecting that as the boot disk.
 
MacDawg said:
I do both (although I use Carbon Copy Cloner). I have my external partitioned and have TM on one and my clone on the other. The both have their pros and cons.
Click to expand...

Same here, but I do them on separate drives - Time Machine is on a WD drive attached to my AE at home, and CCC clones are done on a portable drive I keep at work so I have an off-site back-up as well...

miles01110 is right - your drive can go bad no matter what back-up system you use. Pick one (or 2 if you're paranoid) that will be the easiest for you so you don't forget. Time Machine is great in this way, IMHO, and user SuperDuper as a secondary back-up method just in case as well...
 
MacDawg said:
Both are good solutions (TM and SuperDuper)

Time Machine - does incremental backups and lets you go back in time to find things that you may have deleted or that may have been corrupted, and lets you restore your system in total, BUT you cannot boot from it.

SuperDuper - makes a bootable clone of your setup at that time and it is bootable, allowing you to be up and running in an instant... and depending on how often you clone, you can be right back where you were, booted and running. But, you cannot go back in time to get things that you may have deleted, and if your system is corrupt when cloned, well your clone is corrupt too.

I do both (although I use Carbon Copy Cloner). I have my external partitioned and have TM on one and my clone on the other. They both have their pros and cons.

Woof, Woof - Dawg
pawprint.gif
Click to expand...

Very interesting, I think I will stick to using SuperDuper for now.

Does anyone know of a safe way of testing to see if my backup is corrupt or not?
 
Benguitar said:
Very interesting, I think I will stick to using SuperDuper for now.
Click to expand...

If you have space on the external, you might as well do Time Machine on it, too. TM plays nicely with Super Duper, and they can both be on the same hard drive/partition.

Edit: The nice thing is that if you have a clone, you can just TM your user folder, or even just your documents folder (or whatever).
 
Dimwhit said:
If you have space on the external, you might as well do Time Machine on it, too. TM plays nicely with Super Duper, and they can both be on the same hard drive/partition.

Edit: The nice thing is that if you have a clone, you can just TM your user folder, or even just your documents folder (or whatever).
Click to expand...

I've got a 200GB internal HD, 250GB external?

Picture1-9.png


Do you think I have enough space to do so?
 
Benguitar said:
I've got a 200GB internal HD, 250GB external?

Picture1-9.png


Do you think I have enough space to do so?
Click to expand...

It's recommended that the drive you use for Time Machine have a capacity of at least 1.5x the size of the drive you're backing up. If you want to do both SuperDuper and Time Machine on the same drive, I'd suggest a 500GB drive at the very least, and a 1TB would be even better.

EDIT: And you'll need to partition the back-up drive as Time Machine, IIRC, won't work with a drive/partition that has other stuff on it. I could be wrong on this part, though...
 
r6girl said:
It's recommended that the drive you use for Time Machine have a capacity of at least 1.5x the size of the drive you're backing up. If you want to do both SuperDuper and Time Machine on the same drive, I'd suggest a 500GB drive at the very least, and a 1TB would be even better.
Click to expand...

Ah... crap..
 
Benguitar said:
I've got a 200GB internal HD, 250GB external?

Picture1-9.png


Do you think I have enough space to do so?
Click to expand...

It depends. The 1.5x drive recommendation is, I believe, if you plan to back up the entire drive. If you just wanted to back up certain folders (documents, movies, pictures, etc.), you could still probably us it, depending on how much you have there.

You would, however, have to keep a close eye on it.
 
Dimwhit said:
It depends. The 1.5x drive recommendation is, I believe, if you plan to back up the entire drive. If you just wanted to back up certain folders (documents, movies, pictures, etc.), you could still probably us it, depending on how much you have there.

You would, however, have to keep a close eye on it.
Click to expand...

Music (iTunes libary/GarageBand), Movies (iMovie/iTunes/iDVD), Photos (pictures folder/iPhoto), iWeb, Address Book (iChat contacts etc), emails/pages/word documents, and safari bookmarks.

That is pretty much it.

Think it can be done? Yay/Nay? Erase external and smart update with superduper (backup all files) then TM?

Or something else?
 
Benguitar said:
Very interesting, I think I will stick to using SuperDuper for now.

Does anyone know of a safe way of testing to see if my backup is corrupt or not?
Click to expand...

SuperDuper creates a regular drive image. You can browse the drive with Finder just like your internal drive. If you use the option to make the drive bootable, you can test the backup by booting from the external drive.
 
rich.smith said:
SuperDuper creates a regular drive image. You can browse the drive with Finder just like your internal drive. If you use the option to make the drive bootable, you can test the backup by booting from the external drive.
Click to expand...

Do you mind refreshing my memory on how to "boot" up from a external drive?

There is a great possibility I will be getting a 250GB MacBook Pro very soon, so my external and internal HD's will be the same size.

Hmm..... I think about things too much..
 
Benguitar said:
Do you mind refreshing my memory on how to "boot" up from a external drive?

There is a great possibility I will be getting a 250GB MacBook Pro very soon, so my external and internal HD's will be the same size.

Hmm..... I think about things too much..
Click to expand...

As the previous poster said, hold down the option key during the boot process.

Also, if your external disk is a portable drive that contains a SATA drive, you can put the disk inside the MBP if your internal drive completely fails.

SuperDuper is a great solution and I highly recommend it. I don't currently use time machine, but I do use CrashPlan. I have the multiple computers in my house backing up to each other and an assortment of external drives. With CrashPlan, I only backup the user's data from each machine, not the whole disk.
 
Dimwhit said:
It depends. The 1.5x drive recommendation is, I believe, if you plan to back up the entire drive. If you just wanted to back up certain folders (documents, movies, pictures, etc.), you could still probably us it, depending on how much you have there.

You would, however, have to keep a close eye on it.
Click to expand...

I have a 500 GB Western Digital MyBook, and a 320 GB drive in my MacBook. I never back up my entire drive using Time Machine, because I keep a copy of all of my documents, photos, movies, and music on a FAT partition on the WD drive so that all of my computers can share those files. I just back up the system settings on my Mac using Time Machine, and make a clone using SuperDuper in the event of hard drive failure.
 
Is there any point in buying SuperDuper to get the extra features if you are just going to clone an OS X drive or is the free version good enough? It's only £20 so not a problem to get it if there's something useful included. I've filled up my old Mini's HDD and it needs replacing.
 
I backed up my internal Hard Drive last night using SuperDuper, and booted up from it on my MacBook using FireWire 400 and it worked flawlessly. Then I booted up on my brother's PowerBook G4 using FireWire 800 and it again worked flawlessly.

So it appears I will have no problems when I go to transfer the information onto my 15 inch MacBook Pro when it arrives.
 
How are you going to go about transferring the information to the new computer?

I've always had good luck with using the Migration Assistant. It seems to get a lot more stuff that when I drag 'n drop stuff manually.
 
aristobrat said:
How are you going to go about transferring the information to the new computer?

I've always had good luck with using the Migration Assistant. It seems to get a lot more stuff that when I drag 'n drop stuff manually.
Click to expand...

Migration Assistant on startup of the MBP most likely.

If that fails.. I may try booting up from my external HD and then using SuperDuper to copy *External* to *Internal*.
 
Benguitar said:
If that fails.. I may try booting up from my external HD and then using SuperDuper to copy *External* to *Internal*.
Click to expand...
Be careful in that situation. A lot of times, a SuperDuper backup will boot OS X on a different model machine, but it won't always have everything. For example, if you're moving to a new MacBook Pro, the trackpad drivers on the SuperDuper backup of your MacBook may not support all of the gestures, etc.

Hopefully Migration Assistant will kick butt and you won't even have to worry about that! :)
 
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