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Old 10-28-2007, 06:32 PM
Felix Felix is offline
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Join Date: Jun 2007
Location: Texas
Posts: 30
Andy agrees with Dave...keep SuperDuper!

What's Leopard really worth?
By Andy Ihnatko

Some priceless Andy Ihnatko snips...

There are three kinds of backup apps:

1) Intense and punitively-complex network utilities best left to the sort of admins who have had their ears surgically-resculpted into elf or Vulcan points.

2) Utilities designed to help the typical user back up their data in a simple, practical, flexible, and effective way.

3) The “freak” apps.

Time Machine is a “freak” app.

For my own needs Time Machine is actually inferior to a mainstream, non-freak backup app. I use Shirt Pocket Software’s SuperDuper.

And if my internal drive goes toes (or some other fleshy protuberance)-up, I can just restart my Mac and boot from my Super Duper backup. I’ll be back up and running again in five minutes. I was fairly amazed to learn that Time Machine backups aren’t bootable. If I rely solely on Time Machine for backups and there’s a major crash, I’m hours away from a functional Mac. Unless of course I had the forethought to partition my Time Machine volume and add a separate boot volume with a functional copy of Leopard on it.

So: $15 [The value Andy puts on Time Machine]. It doesn’t offer the flexibility or safety of a traditional backup app and it has one new feature that you might like or you might completely ignore for the life of the OS. I’d be advising the developer to undercut the $28 Super Duper! for this initial release, and then bump the price to $29 when it gains some new features.
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