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Backup software

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Which software is good if I only want to backup certain folders and files and I want to keep a set of rotating backups for each day of the week.
 
@ Paul

What do you use for your SATA array? Did you buy the whole thing as a single product or piece it together yourself? Currently I have a desktop with several SATA drives, but I would like to move to a laptop and have an easy way to connect to those drives.
thanks.

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Andy Fitz
http://www.andyfitz.com
 
The operative words are "After I replaced the drive ..." With SuperDuper, one's external hard disk is made bootable and can be used even just moments after the computer's hard drive goes south - and can be used until the computer's hard disk is replaced. This is how SuperDuper provides better protection. (By the way, I speak from personal experience.)
Daniel said:
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.
Click to expand...
...
Daniel said:
But Time Machine, I feel, is brilliant. I fail to see to what extent
SUperDuper provides better protection against data loss.

Daniel
Click to expand...
--
Bob Yanal
http://www.flickr.com/photos/16445975@N05/
http://gallery.mac.com/ryanal#gallery
 
I upgraded to Leopard early this year and have NOT been using Time Machine. I was concerned about the progressive back-up facility which would imply that you are always multiplying your backup meaning that a shoot with all the amendments will end up taking up a lot of space... thus a lot of full HDs by my calculation. If you are like me who takes the pics, edits in Lightroom and then only needs to store them, then the progressive back-up facility of TM appears over complicating the issue.

Before I upgraded to Leopard, I used to use Retrospect as a backup facility that seemed to work well. But then Lightroom Killer Tips posted a video about backing-up files using Carbon Copy Cloner. I had used the application a few times prior to do upgrades, etc. I was switched. Not only do I now have a bootable disk (that allows me to run Disk Warrior without problems on the Startup disc) but I also don't need half a dozen drives to store all the data on.
You can find the video tutorial here:
http://www.lightroomkillertips.com/2007/video-backing-up-lightroom/

I have to login into my Mac to use it and naturally I don't want the machine to keep the login details in the keychain so setup an exclusive login user that allows access to the Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) overnight when I back-up so that CCC can run its script. If you want some help let me know and I will try to remember how to set it up.

I now backup my internal drives every night switching the drives (physically) just incase there is a problem. (Haven't worked out a solution to identifying specific drives for separate backups - if anyone can help let me know.)

I still like the 'graphics' of Time Machine but find it a little more of a gimic (from what I have tried on my laptop).
Good luck and hope this helps.
 
I have excluded my Aperture and Lightroom libraries and my VMware image from TM and over a two month period my TM backup has reached about 200 GB for about 160 GB of source data. Hardly a huge accumulation. If you pay a little bit of attention, TM size does not run out of control.

(I naturally also have a SD backup. Nobody says TM makes SD or CCC redundant, it offers additional functionality in a very nice package.)
 
This is a free app I use to sync changes to many of my folders to my shared drives on my G3: http://www.grapefruit.ch/iBackup/downloads.html

I've heard good things about Super Duper, it gives you bootable disk images, which is great to restore a broken drive / crashed system. http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html

Everything I sync to is setup as a RAID 1, I have simply had to replace way too many drives.
--
'OOOOOH, they have the Internet on computers now!' Homer J. Simpson
 
I use Chronosync to backup individual file folders. It is very easy to use. Has very useful features such as scheduling and archiving. It works with NAS, SAN, and DAS. It's cheap too. Whatever you do also consider having a backup that is stored off-site.
 
Bob Yanal said:
The operative words are "After I replaced the drive ..." With
SuperDuper, one's external hard disk is made bootable and can be used
even just moments after the computer's hard drive goes south - and
can be used until the computer's hard disk is replaced. This is how
SuperDuper provides better protection. (By the way, I speak from
personal experience.)
Click to expand...
It's only the operative words if the computer you're protecting is your only machine. I have a Mac Pro and a MacBook Pro, and I can easily be without one of the two for a couple of days. Yes, a bootable backup is handy, but if it's all you have, you will lose whatever was created or modified between the crash and the last backup.

Now I had one hard disk failure in all my time of using Macs (and I've been using Macs since before they had hard disks), but I simply cannot count the number of times I've needed files I had inadvertently deleted or edited. No matter what happens, I will not lose more than one hour's worth of work, and that, to me, is more important that having a bootable backup.

By the way, if you have an external drive, it's very quick to boot off the Leopard DVD and do a full restore of a Time Machine backup to another volume. Mind you, if I had a single Mac, I'd do a daily bootable backup and use Time Machine as well.

"Better protection" is a personal and subjective thing that depends on the way you use your machine, whether you have access to only one or more machines, and what you most wish to protect against. it's not some sort of universal rule.

Daniel
 
I think Retrospect probably has the worst user interface of just about any commercial software product I've ever used in my life and, besides that, requires knowledge of backup strategies on the users part and, finally, is very slow. I actually tried to restore a file once but finally gave up due to the bizarre UI. I would only recommend it in a few special situations to very knowledgeable users.

Time Machine is ideal for most Mac users. It uses a good backup strategy and requires virtually no thought or action on the user's part whatsoever. The only downside to Time Machine (and it's a small one if you ask me) is if you lose your entire hard drive (one of the rarer reasons for a restore, BTW) because you must first reinstall Mac OS X on your new drive before performing a restore.

Jack
tdshepard said:
Retrospect is a fine product. Apple's time machine is a shameless
clone...
Click to expand...
 
I would also like to add CronoSync to the discussion. Available at http://www.econtechnologies.com/ it is very good at backup and synchronisation to network drives, and can auto-mount network shares and supports scheduling. I have found that SuperDuper does not support network backups (out of the box) that well.

I think for external drive backups, SuperDuper is very good, but if you want to backup to NAS or RAID drives, the CronoSync is worth a look.
--
Ian

http://digitalopia.com/ - Digital Photography with the Apple Mac, from Amateur to Professional
 
I use a Burly multiport 5 disk enclosure with a lycom host card.

Awesome setup...fast, reliable and so much more convenient than multiple externals.

Drives go into trays that are hotswappable meaning you can have more than 5 trays ie. for offsite backups etc.

Very sturdy metal enclosure with dual cooling fans.

--
http://www.pbase.com/pwh
 
I gave up on Retrospect years ago for a variety of reasons... SuperDuper! has never let me down and the tech support is second to none.

Recently I upgraded an external SD! cloned Tiger volume to Leopard... For two weeks I tested the Leopard upgrade by booting from the external cloned volume. When I was satisfied that All Was Well I simply used SD! to copy the cloned external volume onto my iMac internal drive.

Worked like a champ... SD! saved me from potential problems on my main Mac and saved me time I would have spent installing the upgrade on the iMac drive.
 
I've made several variations of this post on this forum several times over the years but to reiterate...

Most of these discussions about "backup" software fail to make the distinction between incremental backups and cloning. Time Machine, Retrospect, and other software do (or are capable of) incremental backups while SuperDuper, Carbon Copy Cloner, and other software do cloning. The difference is that cloning provides a snapshot of your drive at the time you made the clone thus discarding any previous versions of files (unless you keep multiple snapshots which I doubt is done very often). Incremental backups, on the other hand, store a new copy of a file if it has changed as well as storing new files while continuing to retain the old versions of the file (up to a point, usually).

Incremental backups vs. cloning may not seem like an important distinction but it is. Statistically, the number one reason that people want to do a restore is because a file was accidentally deleted, corrupted, or for some other reason--not because a drive has failed. I know this because I worked for a major backup software company for many years as well as being responsible for backups for a large organization for many other years.

So, one fundamental choice you are making with your selection of "backup" software is whether you are more interested in quickly recovering from a failed drive by using cloning software or recovering a single file or even an entire drive, though not as quickly as with a clone, by using incremental backup software.

Jack
Bob Yanal said:
The operative words are "After I replaced the drive ..." With
SuperDuper, one's external hard disk is made bootable and can be used
even just moments after the computer's hard drive goes south - and
can be used until the computer's hard disk is replaced. This is how
SuperDuper provides better protection. (By the way, I speak from
personal experience.)
Click to expand...
 
I see your points, that SuperDuper and Time Machine give different sorts of protection, and if you want to recover a file you inadvertently deleted an hour ago, having a bootable backup done a few days earlier isn't going to help.

I actually bought a second external hard drive - can't remember the brand name, but it was $US119, 230 GB, powered through USB - in order to use Time Machine.

Problem is, I've started to make this drive my Time Machine backup several times, only to find out that after HOURS only a fraction of my hard drive was copied. (Is this why they call it TIME machine?)

Maybe when I have more time, I'll set the new drive up as a TM backup.
--
Bob Yanal
http://www.flickr.com/photos/16445975@N05/
http://gallery.mac.com/ryanal#gallery
 
Time Machine is pretty slow. Over Gigabit Ethernet (to a Time Capsule) it maxes out at about 6 MB/s (or 48 Mbit/s) which is about 5% of the nominal speed of the connection and in the order of about 10% of the maximum throughput of the hard disk.

(Ok, with Time Capsule it is writing into a sparse disk image bundle that certainly doe not help speed-wise.)

Overall, my initial backup with TM of about 130 GB took about 10 hours (ie, overnight, I am not sure anymore of the precise duration), this would an average speed of 3.7 MB/s.

But hey, as long as it finishes the hourly backup in less than one hour, it fulfills its purpose.
 
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