SuperDuper 2.5 (Finally) Released
TechnicalI've been looking forward to this for a long time now. SuperDuper, of course, is the outstanding backup software for Macs and this release offers compatibility with OS X Leopard. It's not free, sadly, but it's one of those apps that is far enough ahead of its free counterparts that I believe it's worth paying for. Yeah, I know Leopard ships with TimeMachine. Wonderful. Fantastic. Not good enough. Doesn't work for me.
I don't mean that it literally doesn't work for me. It probably functions just fine. My problem with it is that TimeMachine forces me to park a big ol' external hard drive on my desk and hard-wire it to my machine. One of the reasons I transitioned to laptops all these years ago is because I really like the small footprint. My workspace doesn't feel as cluttered as it did when it was dotted with a monitor (or two) and all of the other accoutrements. I actually have room to, you know, work. My mission is minimalism - even at the expense of a proper backup, apparently. Why TimeMachine can't natively support backups to a network server, preferably over wireless, I don't know. The cynic in me is inclined to wonder whether it was a deliberate ploy to create a market for Time Capsule, though the fanboy in me keeps the cynic from getting too belligerent. The point is, TimeMachine doesn't backup to a network server. Nor is a TimeMachine copy bootable. A SuperDuper copy is, though. Another check in favor of the latter, as far as I'm concerned.
I upgraded to Leopard about a week after its release (when was that? October? November?) and hadn't done a backup until two nights ago after installing the SuperDuper upgrade. I was fortunate that nothing catastrophic happened in the interim, to be sure. I waited to write this until I had performed two backup operations - one kicked off manually and the other scheduled - and I'm happy to report that the upgrade was every bit as seamless as I could have dreamed it to be. Not only was the upgrade itself easy, but even after several months worth of file system changes, both backups ran without issue.
Comparatively speaking, I'm feeling very safe these days thanks to the guy(s) at ShirtPocket Software.
For personal use, I'm not sure there's anything better than SuperDuper for a full system backup. The first go-round is pretty slow because it has to back up _everything_. After that, the paid for version has a SmartUpdate option so that only what's changed gets updated. I run it overnight and it's usually done by morning. I've never cared enough to look at whether it took an hour or 5 hours.
Wish I could be more help. I'll look at my logs in the morning and see what they look like after tonight's backup.
For my needs, that's pretty speedy. Not sure whether it meets yours.
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