SuperDuper - Backup Strategy

As stated in my entry for October 16th, I'd already come to the conclusion that it would be a good idea to acquire an external hard drive for the purpose of taking a full backup or my MacBook's hard drive.

BiL pointed me in the direction so "SuperDuper" and "Carbon Copy Cloner" and with the realisation that either one could be used to create not just a full backup, but a clone one my internal drive, which could then be swapped in the even of a major disaster, I headed for eBay.

In the same way that I had found 512mb of memory wasn't enough for my purposes, it's unsurprising that other people have found that they've filled the hard drive that came with their MacBook a bit sooner than they thought. This isn't an issue for me because I tend to work with simple text files so despite the resource hungry apps that run on the Mac, my 60gb drive will, or would have been, plenty for a long time to come.

Anyway, the point is that I picked up an 80gb hard drive on eBay for 40 quid which had seen only a few months use before the owner had upgraded his own MacBook to a bigger drive. Add on another 8 quid for a suitable USB caddy shipped from Hong Kong (the first time I'd 'risked' that actually and I was VERY pleased with the result), and all I had to do was wait for the postman.

The hard drive arrived last week and the caddy came this morning. Assembling them was a doddle (the caddy even came with a tiny little screwdriver), and then it was on to the software.

SuperDuper promised easy of use but had a 28 dollar price tag for the full version after you've done the free trial (which does not have the 'smart' features), as opposed to Carbon Copy Cloner's request for a 5 dollar donation if you like it. I decided to try CCC first on the grounds that it seemed to offer a trial of all the facilities before I parted with any cash. Thus I downloaded Carbon Copy Cloner, installed it and fired it up.

Problem 1 was that when it asked me where I wanted to copy from and to, the options were "Macintosh HD" and "Macintosh HD 1" (because the new drive had been supplied with a fresh installation of OS X as a means of wiping it). In the end I figured out that the former was the internal drive and the latter was the external drive but it wasn't especially clear and didn't fill me with confidence.

Problem 2 was that the 'smart backup options' for CCC are not 'built in' as they were not written by the author and require an additional download. There was a big friendly button that offerd to do this automatically but upon pressing it I was told that it couldn't find the download site and that I'd have to do it manually - with no indication of where I might go to do that.

Meanwhile, SuperDuper was pointing, laughing and shaking its head, so I decided to give it a chance.

It's called SuperDuper and it reckons it's easy to use. I reckon it's dead easy to use and I call it "Bloody Brilliant". It told me that I could copy from/to the same drives that CCC had offered but this time it gave me little icons, one of which was clearly the interal drive while the other was clearly an external USB type. It hand-held me though the whole process. Of course the initial copy took a while but within half an hour of it finishing I'd registered and paid them my 28 dollars. I guess you could say I'm a fan.


The final step on this occasion, was that I decided to swap the drives over as I figured that it made more sense to have the 80gb drive in my MacBook and use the 60gb drive in the caddy for use as a backup. This also went like a dream. The hard drive is user upgradable on the MacBook (instructions are out on the web) so as long as you have the necessary tiny screwdrives and star/hex keys it's easy peasy, and of course because the drives were cloned, my MacBook just booted up and carried on from where I'd left off. Brilliant!

Future backups should be a lot faster now that I've registered the software and got access to the smart backup options; which 're-synch' the drives to account for anything that's been added, deleted or changed rather than doing a full copy.


Anybody reading this and thinking of going down the same route should consider that while this backup strategy gives me an easy way to restore individual files that I might accidentally damage (I just have to connect the external drive and do a drag and drop exercise) and against a failure of my internal hard drive (in which case I just swap the drives), it does not protect me against fire, theft and/or terrorists armed with cups of coffee if the external drive is sitting on the desk next to the MacBook when the disaster strikes. A second consideration is that if a file gets damaged and I don't notice until after I've done a backup, I'm stuffed because I don't have a previous backup to refer to.

The first issue can be resolved by storing the external drive in a different location. Obviously they have to come together when they are being used but they can be kept apart at other times. How far apart depends on your cirumstances. In a different building is fine for most people but governments and international companies should store their's in a different city/country just in case one gets nuked (with a real nuke).

The second issue could be solved with additional drives however the issue here is really with data files so my plan is to archive them to CD on a fairly regular basis in addition to keeping the cloned hard drive up to date as protection against disk failures.