What's the interim (Leopard) backup recommendation?
 

I'm feeling a bit nervous/vulnerable...10 days now without a "real" backup of my laptop which was updated with Leopard on the release date. Photos, music, documents, software updates, etc. are being added at an alarming rate. And the further I get away from 26 Oct (Leopard release), the more time it's going to take to recover from a catastrophic failure of a HHD or unrecoverable disk corruption.

So what's the interim recommendation until a Leopard-compatible SuperDuper! is released?

Should I just plug in an external drive when convenient and let Time Machine do its thing? And then use the Time Machine restore function to rebuild the internal laptop drive if I had to? That's not very fast for sure but I guess it will work as long as I also have the Leopard install disc at hand.

But what about an internal laptop drive failure? Is there a way to install the Time Machine backup on a second external drive and "bless" it as a bootable drive...thus allowing the laptop to function while a replacement internal drive is being procured?

Or is there another (already Leopard-compatible) application which will allow me to make a bootable clone of my Leopard install to an external drive?

I'm starting to feel "unprotected" and need some suggestions please.

Temporary
 

As a temporary solution may I suggest using Carbon copy Cloner! I cloned both of my macs and while experimenting with Leopard did a dumb thing (Not uncommon for me!) Having a clone saved a lot of time for me. BUT be assured when SuperDuper is ready CCC will disappear.

It depends what your standard backup practise is. When I was using SuperDuper! on Tiger, every night I did a smart-update backup to a drive I call Clone. To duplicate this, I do an erase-destination-and-copy thing with Disk Utility. It's not automated/scheduled, of course, so I manually fire it up every night. And of course the more data I have, the more time it takes, since it's not a smart update, so I just let it do its thing while I'm asleep.

I'm making an effort to minimise app clutter for the time-being, using OS X's own utilities before looking elsewhere. Since I know that the app I want is SuperDuper!, I'll only have to uninstall CCC when we get a Leopard-compatible from Shirt Pocket, so I thought I would try Disk Utility in the meantime instead. It's been working fine for me.

Hth.

I've been using CCC once a week since it can't do "smart backups" and using Mozy online backup for daily stuff. I miss SuperDuper but so far I've been Ok using this method. Haven't started using Time Machine yet since I don't want to use my current external for it - waiting on Black Friday to purchase.

In the meantime, I'd suggest using Time Machine, as I did in my post about Time Machine and Leopard. It does a good job of saving things, and while you won't have the immediate recoverability that SuperDuper! can provide until we release our Leopard version, you will have a backup should something occur.

Remember that the two programs are complimentary solutions. Either can stand on its own, of course, but they're better together.

CCC can do smart backups. Do a copy selected items and just select the whole drive (everything). CCC only updates things that have changed. You can also check "Delete the items that don't exist on the source" unless you want to keep things even if they have been deleted from the source (not an exact clone). This works well and is just as fast as SuperDuper. The only issue with CCC is that scheduling appears to be broken in Leopard.

You might want to check out Jungle Disk, which I also use as a complement to Super Duper. Even though it's not a bootable clone, I can back up my important files and have an off-site backup.

Another option can be found in this thread re: using disk utility in the mean time

http://www.shirt-pocket.com/forums/s...5010#post15010

..

Thanks for me making aware of CCC's ability to do smart backups. :)

I've been using Time Machine and am quite happy with it.

However, I can't vouch for the full system recovery aspect of it (since I haven't had to do so). That is something that I *can* vouch for with SuperDuper! My impression is that SD would be much faster and easier to recover from a hard drive failure.

Don't I wish...
 

boy:I wish that was my experience. I've got about 1.7 million files eating up 286 gigs on my main drive.

CCC takes almost exactly one hour to do its "changed files only" update. SD takes 20 minutes.

The latter is a nice coffee break; the former is a PITB...

Looking forward to the Leopard release, too... and that's why.

Time Machine has been doing the job for me since my upgrade. It has done well. When SuperDuper! goes online, it will pitch in too. I want to have SD do the smart backup on my USB 1 TB hdd and Time Machine to do a backup over the network to a drive plugged into my Airport Extreme Base Station N gigabit. Hopefully, 10.5.1 will fix that for me.

Together, they will truly be the best solution. Time Machine is great for getting those files back from a few weeks ago while SD always did a great job of getting me up and going like a champ in a snap!

SD can't come soon enough.