Time Machine or Super Duper

[bogart]

One (which?) or both (using a firewire disk for superduper and the wireless disk for time machine) ?????

Well having just got set up on a macbook pro I've bought a 250G firewire which has half my windows rubbish on while I sort it out gradually (I'd like to keep the mac tidy). So now I reach the point where I'm installing development stuff and conscious of the risk I think I need good backup - so I'm just going out to buy another 250G firewire to use with SuperDuper as a bootable backup with the thought that later I will buy one of those wireless 802.11n access points with built in disk to use with time machine in addition to the superduper disk. But is this overkill ? Maybe I should be just using time machine on the firewire disk and not superduper. I'm completely new to macs so thoughts please on the best policy and way to handle these things for the day we all hope will never arrive.

Of course a real programmer would just use rsync and not eat quiche ;-) .

andy

 

[heatmiser]

SuperDuper (like Carbon Copy Cloner) allows for fully independent bootable backups. The choice is clear.

If your drive dies or laptop's stolen, you just plug the external into the nearest Mac,

and it's like having your computer all over again.

 

[iSee]

Redundency in backups is good, so I can't argue against both. But:

The advantage to SD is that, in case of failure, your backup is bootable. With TM you'd have to go through a restore process.

But TM is less obtrusive and has the extensive, hourly, backup history. So it protects much better against accidental deletions and in cases where you suddenly realize you want to get at an older version of something.

For me (I have a MBP, too), TM's ability to do backups wirelessly in a reasonable amount of time is great. (Actually, I dont know whether or not SD can be configured to do this as well.)

I went with TM only because:
1. It's included in Leopard.
2. I like the backup history (along with the browser that makes it easy to find things in the history)
3. I don't forsee that I'd need to be able to immediately boot off of my backup in case the primary drive fails.

I do occasionally run a Carbon Copy Cloner full backup to an external driver, though, because I don't quite fully trust TM.

And I have a script to backup my wife's business documents off-site (in addition to the TM backup (It would be very bad for her business if she were to lose her law office documents even though, techincally, the files on her computer are backups of the paper documents in her physical files.