Time Machine and SuperDuper, or just Time Machine

[bigben2wardpitt]

First, a little about what I have"

500 gb My book external hard drive
250 gb hard drive on macbook pro, only using about 100, and probably won't get much bigger than 150 GB - but you never know could get bigger.

So let me get something straight:

Time machine doesnt give you a bootable replica (for the lack of better words) of your hard drive, so you can boot right up using it. what you had to do is have the install cd (or i guess its a dvd now) to do that.

Personally, although that isnt as easy as having a clone of your hard drive using super duper is, if I can still boot from time machine, i just need the install dvd, that is good enough for me. I mean, once I boot up with that external hard drive and install dvd, i can move everything back over to that fresh, working built in hard drive. Right?

 

[Illusio]

Time machine will do a complete restore for you.

A week or so ago the hard drive failed on my wife's macbook. We took it to the apple store and the swapped it out for us. It only had a fresh copy of the OS on there. Once we turned it out and started the computer up, it eventually asked if we wanted to transfer stuff from an exiting mac, and we just hooked it up to the time capsule and it complete restored her hard drive. She didn't loose a single file from before the crash and it's not running like it never happened (without having to reinstall any programs).

I don't know if you can boot off time machine, but if you have the install cd and your backup you should be all good.

 

[Eug]

Yeah, do both. Time Machine really is just a file backup method (and backs up previous versions of files too).

SuperDuper! is a system backup method.

 

[randomlinh]

Originally posted by: Eug
Yeah, do both. Time Machine really is just a file backup method (and backs up previous versions of files too).

SuperDuper! is a system backup method.

I was under the impression you could restore from TM. Granted, it's not as simple as the superduper method of basically copying the drive over (as I understand it).

both seem overly redundant (and I'm a paranoid data person) unless say the super duper one was a remote backup one. Which is what I sorta do, minus the super duper part (just a critical files backup)

 

[Eug]

Yeah, you can restore from a TM backup, assuming everything goes well after the several hour restore process (and assuming you have an extra drive to restore to... if your primary drive is fried).

However, with SuperDuper!, you simply plug in the backup drive, and you instantaneously have a 100% perfectly functional machine.

If you think TM alone is good enough that's fine, but I always want a secondary backup as well anyway, so it makes sense to have both (although at the moment my two backups are actually both SuperDuper! copies).

 

[randomlinh]

Originally posted by: Eug
Yeah, you can restore from a TM backup, assuming everything goes well after the several hour restore process (and assuming you have an extra drive to restore to... if your primary drive is fried).

However, with SuperDuper!, you simply plug in the backup drive, and you instantaneously have a 100% perfectly functional machine.

If you think TM alone is good enough that's fine, but I always want a secondary backup as well anyway, so it makes sense to have both (although at the moment my two backups are actually both SuperDuper! copies).

ah yes, good point. I'm thinking in my iMac lens. Which I wouldn't touch the hdd... heh.. that's what warranty is for. Though, it's also why I can't buy another imac. I thought it wouldn't bother me.. but well.. yeah. it bothers me, heh.

 

[Kaido]

I do both side-by-side. SuperDuper works fine alongside Time Machine, just set it to backup from a sparseimage file. Time Machine does hourly incremental backups and SuperDuper does nightly incremental backups. When I restore, I do the following:

1. Boot to the Leopard DVD
2. Open up Disk Utility and restore the SuperDuper sparseimage to the new boot drive
3. Boot up to the new boot drive
4. Use Time Machine to restore the latest file backup

Easy-peasy and backup is fully automatic with the pay-for version of SuperDuper.