There are many backup strategies and software available (see my previous post about Backups). Up until two days ago (as of this post) I was using Carbon Copy Cloner 3.0.1 for my backup, it was just doing a nightly full erase and copy backup to my 320GB hard drive.
This worked well until I started using Leopard. Even after re-installing the program a dozen times it still would never copy automatically without user interaction. The error was the following “Untrusted Apps are not allowed to connect to or launch Window Server before login.”. For most they would say “What the hell does that mean”. It’s ALMOST equivalent to “PC Load Letter, What the f*ck does that mean?”
To sum it up, you have to “˜authorize’ an application, using an administrator account, to allow full access to every item on your hard drive, and without it you will not be able to get the bootable backup. That can be super handy in case your internal hard drive decides to take it’s big dump with the “˜hard drives in the stock heap.’
Carbon Copy Cloner is great software particularly for the price of being free. It does allow you to schedule backups, if they ever work. And it will produce a bootable backup for you to be able to boot off of without any issues. And it’s free, who can argue with the price?
I decided to spend the money on Super Duper because of the smart updates. Moreover, it’s a way to help the community. While SuperDuper is free, the free version does not linclude scheduling and smart updates., I felt as though the scheduling and smart updates were well worth the cost. Meaning that you will not have to have a full update every time that you do an update. Instead I can have a more up to date backup than 24 hours old. Additionally doing a smart update will take significantly less time to complete. The reasoning for this is because the only files copied to the hard drive are those that have been added or changed and everything else is just left in place, as is.
The best part of going with Super Duper with having a Carbon Copy Cloner backup already in the can, Super Duper will allow you to do a “˜smart update’ on that backup. It’s just a nice touch so you don’t have to do a whole other update just because you switch software. To emphasize the speed difference with the “˜smart update’ versus full backups the entire last smart update took just over 9 minutes to search all 670,000 files on my hard drive to do just the updated ones.
Super Duper is $27.95 from Shirt-pocket.com
Wayne
