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Backup software

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anyu

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It's been a while since I started using Lacie Silverkeeper and it's rather buggy in Leopard. What is the consensus for a good backup program (not Time Machine) for Intel macs these days? My backup strategy is keeping copies of folders on different drives and doing periodic incremental syncs.
What is everyone using these days?
-Anna
 
My new Mac Pro will have multiple backups, i.e. belt and suspenders. :-)

500GB primary drive
500GB secondary bootable drive mirrored from primary via Super Duper.
320GB NX Capture Cache/Nikon Transfer Secondary Drive
1TB Time Machine drive

:-D
 
Anna - I've been very pleased with SuperDuper for my global backups. I have the program scheduled weekly to back up my Leopard drive to an external LaCie and everything works smoothly. The program also allows you to make the backup drive bootable (assuming it's either an internal HD or a firewire drive) which can really save your neck if you have a complete meltdown. The program is $27 but well worth it. The support is exceptional as well - eMail questions are answered very quickly and very clearly!
 
I m u c h prefer SUPR DUPER to all others, even time machine!
 
Retrospect is a fine product. Apple's time machine is a shameless clone of Retrospect's technique of using hardlinks to create multiple generations of a backup without actually making any unnecessary file duplicates. Retrospect has a significant advantage in that if your hard drive crashes and you have to recover everything, you can be fairly confident that you will succeed. Apple's time machine has a significant advantage in that you will be dazzled with spectacular visual effects.
--
Thomas D. Shepard, Sc.D.
 
Thanks for your reply, would be interested to know your decisiin, I love Retrospect and have been using it for several years.

--
Louise Parrish
CP5000
 
I use superduper and it's fantastic for cloning drives and making bootable copies.

However I recently had a problem with a sparseimage of an iphoto library that got corrupted and TM saved the day enabling me to go back a couple of days and recover that specific file. Very convenient!

--
http://www.pbase.com/pwh
 
I don't understand why people won't use Time Machine. The big advantgage with Time Machine vs. a regularly scheduled backup, even one that occurs twice a day, is that you are never more than an hour away from all the files you're supposed to have.

Recently, my MacBook Pro's 120 gig internal drive died. Time machine had a backup that was twenty minutes old. After I replaced the drive, I booted the MacBook Pro with the Leopard DVD and did a full restore. Bingo: evertything back the way it was 20 minutes before the drive died. If I did weekly backups, I could have lost quite q bit of data.

But, in all fairness, this is the first time I had a catastrophic hard disk failure on the Mac. What happens far more frequently is that I realize that the file I trashed a couple of hours ago was the wrong one, or I edited a file and inadvertently deleted something from it. None of this is a problem with Time Machine because it just does its thing and you don't have to worry about it.

Before Time Machine, I used Retrospect, and I still like the program. You can make backups (compressed) or bootable copies of volumes, you can script what gets backed up and when, and if you're on a network you can back up workstations from a server. I still use retrospect occasionally to copy a volume (for instance, when I want to replace a hard disk); it's fast, safe, and reliable.

But Time Machine, I feel, is brilliant. I fail to see to what extent SUperDuper provides better protection against data loss.

Daniel
 
TM has a limited audience. If I pull in 1000 photos from a wedding, make a series of photoshop files and save them, then make alterations to them and save them and continue to work on images and do that kind of work regularly (as I do), then having incremental backups can grow your backup file to rather large sizes. If you have 800gigs of data on a 1TB disk and you make changes here and there to 100mb files, TM will not be very useful.

I use TM to keep my boot drive backed up, ensuring recent emails and bookmarks and other quickly changing small files don't get lost. I have three 1TB drives for my images and use superduper to do a regular backup of them and I do a manual backup after an afternoon work session. This provides a good balance for my particular workflow.
 
Retrospect is junk....is was designed when a big HD was 6 GIGs !

Retrospect COMPRESSES your data (because they still think HD's are small and expensive).

Let me ask you this:
Do you want some hinky 3rd party software compressing your image files ?

Obviously, NO. Not me thanks.

Super Duper, Time Machine or Chronosync...
 
santa said:
TM has a limited audience. If I pull in 1000 photos from a wedding,
make a series of photoshop files and save them, then make alterations
to them and save them and continue to work on images and do that kind
of work regularly (as I do), then having incremental backups can grow
your backup file to rather large sizes. If you have 800gigs of data
on a 1TB disk and you make changes here and there to 100mb files, TM
will not be very useful.

I use TM to keep my boot drive backed up, ensuring recent emails and
bookmarks and other quickly changing small files don't get lost. I
have three 1TB drives for my images and use superduper to do a
regular backup of them and I do a manual backup after an afternoon
work session. This provides a good balance for my particular workflow.
Click to expand...
So you yourself are illustrating that it's not a limited audience as well - everyone should be using TM, for important things like system backups.

For some datasets like photos, as you note TM is not as practical. In those cases I too use other means of backing up data. But that doesn't make TM very useful everywhere else.

--
---> Kendall
http://InsideAperture.com
http://www.pbase.com/kgelner
http://www.pbase.com/sigmadslr/user_home
 
not to solely rely on one strategy or program for backup just as you wouldn't rely on a single backup copy.

I have Superduper making bootable clones of my key drives and copies are keep on site and offsite.

Chronosync does nightly syncs on my key photo archive drives duplicating them to drives on an esata array.

Timemachine backs up my system drive and has already saved me much hassle as I've been able to go back in hours vs days to recover problem files.

DVD backups of my 80k image archive provide additional line of defence.

--
http://www.pbase.com/pwh
 
Bimthecat said:
Retrospect is junk....is was designed when a big HD was 6 GIGs !
Retrospect COMPRESSES your data (because they still think HD's are
small and expensive).
Let me ask you this:
Do you want some hinky 3rd party software compressing your image files ?
Obviously, NO. Not me thanks.
Click to expand...
a) Retrospect goes back to the days of tape, not 6 gig hard drives
b) compression is lossless, so what's your problem?
c) compression is optional, so what's your problem?
d) "hinky 3rd parry software?" We're talking EMC2 here. Heard of them, maybe?

Let's see... zero out of four. Hmmm, perhaps I should take your opinion that Retrospect is junk with a grain of salt... For the record, I've used the app since the OS 8 days and it has never lost a single byte of data. I did have an issue with a disk that developed a few bad sectors a few years back, but thanks to Retrospect's data redundancy feature I didn't lose a single file. Yeah, junk.

Daniel
 
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