Mac Forum / Applications / Mac Applications / July 2008

Yep. I'm still using Retrospect here to do incremental unattended daily
network backups of every computer in my house to tape and hard drive.

Yep.  I'm using Time Machine on one FW drive, and SuperDuper twice
daily on another.

I use three drives - maybe overkill, but having suffered once before....

TM to a USB 1TB drive

Chronosync to a USB drive attached to a Airport Extreme (only syncs my
home folder)

Superduper to second USB drive

I have Time machine running automatically, but only for user files, against
a dedicated third internal drive.

I run Super Duper manually for a a complete system backup against one of two
external USB drives that I rotate, keeping one in my home and one at work.

Also, I copy my photo libraries and personal records to a NAS drive.

I use a MacBook Pro with a 160 GB drive which I use both at home at at an
office. At each location I have six external firewire 800 drives, two with
160 GB capacity and four with 320 GB capacity. My usage of the drives at each
location is essentially identical.

One of the 160 GB external drives is used as an extension to my internal
drive. The extension at the office contains things that are different from
the extension at home.

The other 160 GB drive at each location contains a SuperDuper! backup of the
internal drive. The home backup being created in the middle of the night and
the office backup being created in the middle of the day.

At each location the 320 GB drives are set up into two mirrored RAID
configurations. One of these configurations is used for Time Machine and the
other is divided into two SuperDuper! partitions, one backing up the internal
drive and one the external drive used as an extensiion.

I should point out that I have a single administrator account and a number of
user accounts, and, in general, the user accounts used at home differ from
the user accounts used at the office. But it should be noted that both the
Time Machine and SuperDuper backups made at each location include all of the
accounts, thus providing redundancy in terms of there being backups at two
different physical locations.

The weak spot in this system, soon to be corrected, is that the 160GB
external drive that is the extension of my internal drive is only backed up
at its home location, the home drive being backed up at home and the office
drive being backed up at the office.

Everyone has their own approach to the backup problem.

Some people get downright violent when discussing the
pros and cons of various backup and restore schemes  ;-)

As far as I can see, no one approach is ideal, a lot depends
on what your specific backup requirements are.

In my case, I need to backup/restore both my OS X partition,
and my Vista partition, on in one fell swoop, in the same
backup file.

Few others here need to do that sort of backup/restore.

I would  *NEVER*  recommend my particular backup
solution to anyone else here - - - even though my backup
scheme has served me well for many years.

My advice? - - - try several backup and restore schemes,
then decide which scheme, or combination of schemes,
works best for you.

Just for laughs, I will describe in general terms what
scheme I chose to use.

My important hour to hour, and day to day documents, such as
my upcoming medical screening for an aneurysm at 12 noon
today, I merely copy it over to a different Mac, plus I store a
separate copy of all my past/present/future medical junk
to an offsite drive in case my house burns down in all the
wildfires that plague my rural area.

(56 wild fires burning right now, heavy smoke here
   for weeks, but I am used to that happening every year)

My  _bootable_  backup and restore for my MacBook Pro's
160 GB internal drive occupy a 10 GB compressed file.

That 10 GB file is capable of restoring my entire 160 GB
hard drive, both the Mac OS 10.5.3 partition, and the
Vista Ultimate 40 GB partition. (Boot Camp created)

Any time I make major changes in either OS X  or  Vista,
such as spending weeks training my "Dragon" speech
recognition app' to recognize many complex medical
terms such as:

"Pneumonoultramisroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis"

(serious affliction caused by breathing the fine
     silica dust from an actively erupting volcano)

...then I create another major bootable backup.
(takes about 30 minutes)

This happens perhaps once a month, on the average.

Just to repeat again -

My advice? - - - try several backup and restore schemes,
then decide which scheme, or combination of schemes,
works best for you.

Good luck   :)

Mark-

I think that, for most users, there currently is nothing superior to
Time Machine.  I say that not because of any specific details of how or
when it does backups, but because its extreme convenience means that
many users will actually _do_ backups when they otherwise would not.  
I'm not going to argue the features of TM vs. other options because I'm
sure people could make strong cases that their choice is better for one
reason or another.  But for _most_ users it doesn't matter because that
other choice is going to seem to inconvenient to them to bother with in
preventing some hypothetical future problem.  The best solution is the
one that actually gets used.

For secondary backups I think offsite backup over the internet is the
best option for most-- for reasons similar to the above.  Taking backups
offsite by carrying hard drives around is a good solution if you don't
mind actually doing it on a regular schedule.  Most people won't,
though.  Meanwhile options like Mozy and CrashPlan offer the benefits of
having the backup offsite with the convenience of Time Machine.  So, as
with TM itself, they're much more likely to be used, and a recent
offsite backup is much more likely to be available when needed.

I do exactly what you proposed. About once a month, I copy my external
disk drive to another drive via SuperDuper and take that off-site until
the next time I copy it. For daily stuff, I just let Time Machine do its
thing to another external disk drive. This works well for me.

I use SuperDuper to backup to an external firewire drive. Easy, works,
easy restores, too.