Best backup software?
 

I'm looking for opinions on what the best backup software is for my mac. Price is no object. I have an 80 gig drive which i wish to backup to my external 120gb drive. I need to back up everything, and have it be able to be completely restored with ease to this 80 gb drive in the event of emergency.

Thanks

how would you guys compare carboncopycloner to superduper!

I used to use BounceBack from CMS Products, but it was causing problems lately. Carbon Copy Cloner seems to do the same job, just as well as BB used to, without any problems. I'm not familiar with Super Duper.

Do you want a human-interface application, or one that is invisible? Not to knock Bombich's excellent utility, but Carbon Copy Cloner is just a pretty front end for the `ditto` command. Writing a background utility to clone drive A to drive B daily at 2am should take maybe a dozen lines of code.

There are probably many discussions on this....

I use Superduper for a cloned sandbox to play in, and Silverkeeper, which came with my LaCie for weekly backup sets.

I have no problems with either. Price is right for Silverkeeper! Superduper is fairly cheap as well.

If price truly is no object and if you really need to back up everything...

...well, then you really need a tape drive, a dozen tapes, and offsite storage for said tapes.

Software at that point is pretty much moot. Personally, I'd go with Ye Olde dump(8) (assuming it works with HFS+, tar(1) if not), but any of the pointy-clicky ones that can do staggered incremental backups would do the trick.

The basic idea is that you make regular backups in such a way that you never have to go through more than a few tapes to restore anything, yet you never have to wait for an entire full backup, either. You keep enough tapes on-site for quick restores, and you keep enough off-site to restore (almost) everything in case the building burns down.

Oh--and, whatever you go with, YOU DON'T HAVE A BACKUP UNLESS YOU'VE TESTED IT. Testing said backup should be a regular part of the routine.

Cheers,

b&

I like Silverkeeper for backups. It works very well, very reliably. I test my backups regularly, and it's been 100% reliable.

Try Intego Personal Backup X3

Very professional, completely transparent, will auto-mount and un-mount a remote drive, even if it's on a PC.

We use this online backup service.

It has an excellent desktop interface for MAC. We regularly backup our critical data with this service and it has been reliable everytime.

The advantage of online backup is that you don’t have to buy any software or do rely upon additional hardware (like what you do).

I'm a confirmed Retrospect user. Retrospect Express comes free with many external FireWire hard drives (at least from Other World Computing). You can boot the backups themselves (if you use "Duplicate") which is proof positive that you've got a valid backup.

I've wiped several drives and restored from backup when it was easier to do than to troubleshoot some problem I had caused in my system, and never had a case where I ended up with missing, corrupted, or improperly restored files.

I like SuperDuper, it's easy and perfect to back up the entire disk to an external HD. If you want it to be bootable, firewire only. Testing is very easy, just boot from the external HD and open some files.

You can use it for free, but some features are turned off. Worth the $28 inmho.

Both CCC and SuperDuper work for me
 

I almost always use SuperDuper, but I had a small problem the other day. On the day of my latest backup (usually every couple days or so) I had a few bad sectors on my hard drive show their ugly heads. I started to use SuperDuper to salvage what I could, but it kept crashing once it hit some corrupt system files. Several failed attempts later I resorted to CCC. CCC found the corrupt system files and allowed me to bypass them while backing the rest of the drive up. The end result with CCC did not give me a bootable system, but I was able to salvage important files.

I installed a new drive, cloned an older backup from a couple days prior, and took the important files I needed from the corrupt CCC backup to get things working again.

My vote has always been for SuperDuper, but keep CCC around unless something weird happens. If SuperDuper runs into corruption is just poops out, but its incrimental backup features and ease of use wins me over.

Just my thoughts.

Thanks guys.

.mac
 

get .Mac. You not only get a backup utility, but lotts more.

I use the OsX Backup utility. How do I go about testing it? Without risking compromising the original data on the Mac HD?

Best regards

Ronnie

I am sorry but are you telling me that -since I have at least 100GB of data to back-up- spending $2,000 per year for that service would actually save me money? Am afraid I beg to differ, since the cost for TWO lacie external disks is around $280 at Amazon (250Gb each) plus SuperDuper at 28.

Unless my math is out of wack, you are sponsoring a service or very rich.

Yeah, iBackup sounds nice...if you're loaded!

I'm really happy with rsyncx. It's free, it's simple, it's small. Is it automated? No, can you script it? Sure. Somewhere around here there was a hint or two about it. I back up my laptop to a firewire drive several times a week and am happy with both the process and the results.

"backup" woe
 

Well, I didn't test Mac's Backup and I suffered!

After a clean install feeling smug that my data was all there. "Backup" refused to do a complete restore, infact it refused to backup anything more than a few files/folders at a time. Except iTunes which worked perfectly. a 100% backup is thus goingh to take maybe 20 hours of intensive work.


My guess?

Backup is designed to restore backups such as " all Apple Works docs" , all" Itunes" and struggles with folders, (like most of mine which have multiple apps).



1/5 Apple, piece of ****.....

Moral - take the "quick pick options" , better still, choose something else...

CCC or Sooper Dooper?


Ronnie

Guess the jury's still out...
 

see this blog

...and this thread

Retrospect has a "duplicate" command in addition to the "Backup" command. I've never had a "duplicate" fail to be a totally viable mirror-image of the target volume. You can boot from the backup immediately, unmount your internal HD (or otherwise original volume, it's usually an internal HD), and test it if you wish.

I use Superduper, and it runs for me at 4am every morning. About the only thing it doesn't do, that Retrospect does do, is historical backups; meaning, make a copy of what your Mac looked like on Monday, then Tuesday, then Wed, etc. So that you have more than just yesterday's backup.

Retrospect is the best, in my opinion, but its interface was always too confusing for me. I could never tell if I was doing what I thought I was doing. If they ever hire a GUI expert and redo its interface, I'll jump back to them.