Which BackUp Program is Best or your Favorite?
 

A poll to see which BackUp program Mac users prefer. I'm having a hard time deciding. I need something that:

(1) Can make BOOTABLE Backups (to CD-Rs- since this is the only thing I have)
(2) Has Incremental and Auto backups
(3) Is relatively Easy to use
(4) Is Dependable

The list includes:
(1) Retrospect Express (or Desktop)
(2) Deja Vu
(3) Carbon Copy Clone
(4) FWB Backup Toolkit
(5) Tri-Backup
(6) Others (if you prefer something else)

As long as it doesn't cost more than $50 or so. Thanks.

The finder.

I only back up documents and disk images, I don't need a bootable CD other than the OS installation. So it's quite easy to drag files into a disk image and burn that periodically.

- It can't make bootable backups (not a problem for me)
- If I use it well I can make incremental backups, but nothing is automatic
- Very easy to use
- It's as dependable as I am.

:D

Well I tried Retrospect a few times, but I find it so damn slow. I personally have found just manually backing my stuff up is the easiest and quickest option. CD's are dirt cheap. And I personally have no need to burn bootable CD's. If I did I would use Bootcd and make one from my OSX repair partition I guess.

I know there are people who need to autoschedule backups and stuff though. Retrospect seemed to have a ton of cool features in it when I tried it. It was just slow.

I personally use CarbonCopyCloner and would recommend it for the seasone Mac user. When I do a new install on an average users machine I install DejaVu for them. DejaVu offers stability and reliability in a pkg that requires no real interaction on the part of the user.

PsyncX
 

PsyncX fits all your criteria and it's schedules can be easily edited with something like CronniX. Better still, it's freeware.

I haven't tried making a bootable clone with it but I've used it for a couple of months now to back up my user folder and have had no problems with it.

I started out thinking I'd backup to CDs or DVDs. Then I started counting just how many disks I'd have to burn for just one backup. Not only was it not as cheap as I first thought, but who would want to sit there switching that many disks during the backup? And I wouldn't have anything I could really boot off of if I were in a bind.

Then I priced firewire drives. For the amount of money I'd have to spend on CDs or DVDs, I could buy a firewire drive to create a real bootable backup. This was one of my better decisions.

Not only can I backup to the firewire drive, but when I upgraded from 10.1.5 to 10.2.3, I used the firewire drive to give me a bootable disk while I repartitioned my internal HDs and loaded Jaguar and moved over my user files. It was one of the slickest backups I've ever had the pleasure of working with.

So before you marry yourself to any backup program, be sure to do the math to see how many CDs you'd have to buy for your backups. You may be surprised to find that a firewire drive might be in the same price range as buying mulitple disk media.

Carbon Copy Cloner backing up to a firewire drive. You can make bootable clones, synchronize one drive to another, and even schedule backups now. It's donation-ware and places no restrictions on anyone who hasn't donated. You'll want to tell Mike Bombich thanks with a few bucks, I'm sure.

vickishome: THANK YOU. That was the intelligent solution I have been looking for. Yes, I keep hearing people talk about FireWire. Thank you for elaborating and providing insightful information. You're right, sitting there swapping out CDs would be nuts! That's what I'll get - a FireWire drive. Thanks again. :D

'psync' to back up to your firewire drive and also make a fully-bootable copy.

'fink install macosx-file-pm'


Cheers...

So how many CDs would you need?

When I did a backup I grabbed every disk image I had and everything in my user folder. Dumped all that to a DVD and it was about 4.5 GB.

Now that I've used OS X longer, I know what I need to back up and what I don't. My personal documents (Note that my music takes about 6GB, but I am not too worried if they get deleted. It'd take some time, but I own all the CDs so I can re-rip at will.) and all disk images for non-Apple installed applications is about 300MB. Note that I don't back up much else from my user directory -- I don't back up preferences, for example, since I can redo those after a reinstall.

So not only "how many CDs would you need", but also what are you backing up?

My solution my not apply as my backups are not generally bootable, but I'll share anyhow.. :)

I use an old external USB drive to backup my entire User directory (keeping all important data localized to the main user) using a free solution, Synk (capable of incremental backups).

In the case of a crash, a simple reinstall of Jaguar from CD-ROM then a transfer of the User directory backup info would reestablish my system mostly. (afterwards dealing with new updates and X11 / Fink installs, to complete the job)

---

Recently after hacking up my system to the core, I just had to do a reinstall - it was acting like swiss cheese on a warm July afternoon. Strange happenings with no solutions in sight.. I decided to use, at that point, CCC to backup and reinstall - what a delight!

Warmly recommended for bootable backups.

I also use CCC to backup my iBook to an external firewire drive. It's easy, it works, and you end up with a bootable backup. What could be simpler.

As previously stated, it depends on how much and often and what you want to back up.
I use Rsynx (rsync via a cron job) to do daily, automated incremental back-ups of my Home Directory (~6 Gb) to an ext. firewire drive . (This has just saved my as.... er, day, as two Travelstar drives just failed on me, but I won't persevere about that).
I also use Carbon Copy Cloner and psync, and actually, it appears that CCC to some extent has a defragmentizing effect. If you have the room and time try checking your / e.g. with tech tools; then make a clone to another drive or partiotion and check it again!

I like and use dump. I use tar from time to time, but prefer dump.

- G!mpy

Ahh, if only there were an HFS+ aware dump (you do know that dump is not saving your resource forks, right?). I am using hfspax and a front end script called bax to emulate dump. work well, but I would prefer plain old dump.....

Haven't used dump yet in OS X. It's nice to know my fav backup utility is useless when playing with HFS+ thought. Thankfully, I only have one machine running OS X, my 12" PowerBook. The machines I watch over are all FreeBSD yippee) or RedHat (yuck).

- G!mpy

I was using bax and hfspax, but I experienced problems during a restore. Hfspax restored most of the files, but then just churned away making no further progress. I eventually managed to get most of the files, but not all. I made a full backup of my home folder using bax again this morning, and then tried to restore the files, but I had the same sort of problem again.

I don't know if there is something special about my config (OS X 10.2.6), or if something is strange about some of my files, or if this is a bug in hfspax. Anyway, I no longer trust hfspax, and am still looking for the perfect solution.

I want something free or cheap, that I can use to make compressed incremental backups that I can burn to a DVD-RW.

Was using DejaVu, but once every other month the backup process would hang requiring a force-reboot. Susequent to the boot I had to boot to 9 to run Disk Warrior before OS X would recognize the drive again. Then I had to to a complete back up all over again.

Since I started using CCC the problem has not occured again.

currently evaluating...

The problem with many of the alternatives is that most of them are basically too brain-dead for managing files with any degree of sophistication other than copying.

Also, they lack file verification for maintaining real data integrity.

Add Synchronize! Pro X to the list of applications above...


So far, my short list includes Tri-Backup, Synchronize! Pro X, PSyncX, RSyncX and Retrospect.


Synchronize! Pro X does not offer a satisfactory trial version.

PSyncX and RSyncX are severely lacking necessary features.

Tri-Backup seems to provide needed features and functions acceptably, although experiencing some speed problems.

Retrospect is well-known to be powerful and reliable. The only problem, apart from cost, is that data is stored in proprietary format rather than copied. Thus, synchronization features are missing.



Please see also this related thread:
How to copy files and verify?
http://forums.macosxhints.com/showth...threadid=12379


If anyone else has other thoughts or opinions, please feel free to post in this thread or the above thread.

I would have to agree with the above posting. There is NO KNOWN reliable method for a 100% verifiable backup of Mac OS X. There are lots of good options, and lots of 99% accurate options. But I have tried them all - and at some point they will leave you in the lurch. The nature of the beast too - is you don't know you've been "lurched" until it comes time to restore a backup. That is my main beef with most OS X and Unix/OSX utilities - none of them seem to do very good error notification. I used to put a lot of faith in CarbonCopyCloner - and it is still at the top of my list - but it doesn't do very good error reporting - which I learned the hard way through my last couple of backups.