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Old 08-04-2005, 02:29 PM
edoates edoates is offline
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Join Date: Jul 2005
Posts: 44
Sparse images: only use smart backup?

Once I've created a sparse image with enough extra space to handle reasonable expansion, is there ever a reason to completely refresh it by doing a full "erase and backup," or is it reasonable to do "smart backup" from then on, forever? That assumes I remember to hdiutil compact <sparse image name> from time to time.

I'm after practical recommendations from those who have used SuperDuper for some time with long periods of only using "smart backup." When I used to use Retrospect, I would do a full backup every two weeks, and incrementals between that because the backup container go very large after a while, and restoring single files took forever to list the directories (apparently it has to pass over all the deleted entries).

So far, I've been using SuperDuper in this Smart mode, and though compacting does takes some time (80GB sparse image, 56GB used), it appears to be functioning OK. I did a trial diskutil "restore" to another firewire drive and it worked perfectly: bootable and all!

Ed
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