Backup guide to OS X (what is your best advice and app)?

ramsesm · Jul 24th, 2005, 03:34 PM

This week I have wondered how other people perform their backups. Besides the obvious advice (do backup and do it often) what advice and application do you recomend to excecute a proper backup?

Also, what devices (drives, tapes etc) do you use for this purpose?

Brian Scully · Jul 24th, 2005, 03:49 PM

	Quote:			Originally Posted by ramsesm
	This week I have wondered how other people perform their backups. Besides the obvious advice (do backup and do it often) what advice and application do you recomend to excecute a proper backup? Also, what devices (drives, tapes etc) do you use for this purpose?

But many of us like Super Duper which allows you to clone the whole drive and do subsequent sequential backups I personally use a 160 gig Maxtor on firewire and rotate thru three different partitions on a daily basis. It takes about 10 minutes to verify permissions and do the changed files. It then reboots into the backed up partition so you can see that it actually works. I then change the boot drive via Start Up Disk so I am back in the MacIntosh internal drive.

Daily backup is an overkill for a retired hobbyist user but none the less a good habit Super Duper is about 20 dollars US and has the BEST support I have ever seen on any program. Email questions are often answered in less time that it takes to get connected to a phone tech person. A prudent business person would probably do a backup to CD or DVD for off site storage

Pelao · Jul 24th, 2005, 06:22 PM

Totally agree with Brian Scully ( I was going to use the initials B.S. 'cause it's Sunday and I am lazy, but it seemed a tad insensitive..).
Anyway, SuperDuper is incredibly easy to use. I use it on 2 PBs, 1 eMac and 2 PM G5s at work, all to external drives.

Heart · Jul 24th, 2005, 09:34 PM

I have recently started to use SuperDuper also and like the application.
All you need is the program and a Back-up Hard Drive.
(A sumular program to CarbonCopyCloner but CCC is not yet supported in Tiger, thus SuperDuper has won the race.)

You can do a backup with the shareware application. Right NOW!

harzack86 · Jul 24th, 2005, 10:48 PM

I just started on that this week end, and was looking for various solutions. Although super duper seems great and simple, I need to do a backup of only some folders on various drives (music, my home folder, my images).
I found iBackup, which is free and allows doing this kind of fine selection, plus things like system preferences... It also allows the scheduling of a backup, I haven't checked yet about incremental backup or rotating backup.
I purchased a 200Gb HD which I installed into an external Firewire enclosure for these backups.

comprehab · Jul 24th, 2005, 10:49 PM

More support for super duper here! Works like a charm!

gwillikers · Jul 25th, 2005, 02:22 AM

Yet another vote for SuperDuper.

gmark2000 · Jul 25th, 2005, 02:38 AM

I just got the latest version of Retrospect Desktop 6.0x. I am backing up three CPUs over my network (eventually scripting overnight incremental back-ups) onto a 500Gb FW800 drive.

I'll probably use SuperDuper to copy to a 2.5" firewire that I'll keep off-site.

I'm a hobbyist that farts around with my macs.

Jul 25th, 2005, 01:56 PM

word of advice with retrospect backups. Do full restores to test, and do them often. You don't even want to know how much data I've lost to retrospect over the years

ramsesm · Jul 25th, 2005, 02:05 PM

	Quote:			Originally Posted by mguertin
	word of advice with retrospect backups. Do full restores to test, and do them often. You don't even want to know how much data I've lost to retrospect over the years

This is a good sound advice for all backup systems as well... backing up and restoring are not the same thing. I have seen millions of dollars worth of backup data that did not restore due to different issues.

So I guess every one is using an external, firewire drive. No network/tape or DVD users out there? interesting.