The End Of Super Duper?!?!

[blasto333]

I have been using Super Duper for awhile, but it seems with Apple's integrated OS solution for backup, super duper will no longer be needed.

It seems with every major OS improvement Apple steals marketshare of 3rd party developers.

I am not sure if this is a good or bad trend, but Super Duper is great software and if they can make it better than Apple's backup, I will certainly support them again.

 

[atszyman]

I have been using Super Duper for awhile, but it seems with Apple's integrated OS solution for backup, super duper will no longer be needed.

It seems with every major OS improvement Apple steals marketshare of 3rd party developers.

I am not sure if this is a good or bad trend, but Super Duper is great software and if they can make it better than Apple's backup, I will certainly support them again.

Apple's solution is not a complete replacement for any of the third party tools, yet. The problem I currently see is that this is using some sort of file journaling system that keeps files saved as a series of changes allowing you to undo any of the changes by walking back through the file. This is great for stuff on your HD if you need a file you changed/deleted yesterday but everything is still stuck on a single HD so a HD failure is still catastrophic (unless you're running a mirrored RAID array which very few do). You will still need to periodically back up your HD to an secondary media source to prevent data loss due to hardware failure.

 

[Applespider]

Until we know a little more about how Time Machine will work, I wouldn't buy the wreath for Superduper.

There's a part of me wondering whether it will be as much of 'feature' as Filevault which sounds great but is near enough unusable to all intents and purposes.

Superduper is still going to be useful for creating bootable backups, safety clones etc

 

[danny_w]

I think they both have a place. As I understood the keynote, Apple's 'backup' or whatever sounds more like a changed-file cache, something like WinME and WinXP already has with System Restore, only deeper and easier to use. It is not a full backup in the sense of a SuperDuper! backup, and does not make for a bootable emergency disk. After all, System Restore hasn't done away with traditional backup for Windows, and this sounds very similar but better.

 

[telecomm]

This is great for stuff on your HD if you need a file you changed/deleted yesterday but everything is still stuck on a single HD so a HD failure is still catastrophic

Is there any reason to think that Time Machine wouldn't be able to make use of an external drive?

 

[atszyman]

Is there any reason to think that Time Machine wouldn't be able to make use of an external drive?

Just the way it was described and appears to work. I'm not saying that it won't have an option for copying everything to an external drive but the way it was demoed made it seam that everything was simply stored on the existing HD. If it were an external backup solution, anytime you wanted to roll back your files or find something from before you would need to have the external drive connected. I see Time Machine as being more of a way to prevent accidental deletion/editing rather than a complete backup solution which still requires another drive/media format to be copied to.

It seems to me to be a great utility for backing up against user mistakes but doesn't cover hardware failure. The fact that they don't put 2 HDs into any Mac in a standard configuration also leads me to believe that it is not intended for guarding against hardware failure.

 

[telecomm]

Fair enough, I suppose we'll have to wait to hear about this from someone with a demo version.

At any rate, it is perhaps worth note that the demo video for Time Machine does show a mounted USB drive on the desktop labelled "Backup".

 

[yellow]

There's definitely NO way this means the end of SuperDuper or CCC.

There's been an Apple version for a while.. it's called "Restore" and it's part of Disk Utility. But that didn't effect SD and the like. There's a lot more to SD than simply using it as a back up. It's an excellent resource for Admin and anyone else deploying many, many computers that are all the same build.

 

[Applespider]

Just the way it was described and appears to work. I'm not saying that it won't have an option for copying everything to an external drive but the way it was demoed made it seam that everything was simply stored on the existing HD. If it were an external backup solution, anytime you wanted to roll back your files or find something from before you would need to have the external drive connected.

I think that's exactly what it depends on - an external drive or server.

The notes under the video on the Leopard site suggests that it runs the first time you plug an external drive in and then you can set how much of the drive you 'save' and when it runs (default is midnight each night) - I don't think it works on your regular HD. I imagine there's a preference for how long you want the Time Machine to run backwards for (a month, three months, whatever)

 

[atszyman]

I think that's exactly what it depends on - an external drive or server.

The notes under the video on the Leopard site suggests that it runs the first time you plug an external drive in and then you can set how much of the drive you 'save' and when it runs (default is midnight each night) - I don't think it works on your regular HD. I imagine there's a preference for how long you want the Time Machine to run backwards for (a month, three months, whatever)

You're completely correct! (I rarely say that to anyone besides my wife ) I didn't read the description. I thought it was just an implementation of a Journaling file system where you can walk back through all the changes successively. I stand corrected....

I am, in fact, an idiot... a point that is hammered home a little more every day...

 

[netdog]

I kept waiting for Steve to announce that it would all work with online servers with a .Mac account, not unlike the way that Google's Desktop Search backups everything on your drives, albeit for free.