Time Machine Vs SuperDuper!

[pjfw01]

Hi all

For anyone who's wondering if Time Machine can act as a replacement for SuperDuper! I've like to relate an experience that showed me it can't.

Early Thursday morning (partly due to my own stupidity) I lost my entire iTunes library! I knew it was really gone, as my hard disk had suddenly gained 22 gigabytes of free space.

I have two FireWire 400 drives connected to my iMac: one for SuperDuper! to clone to (and I was pretty-much hating Shirt Pocket right then) and one for Time Machine.

So I used Time Machine to go back to midnight and set a restore. The transfer rate was abysmal and I had to go to work so I turned off Energy Saver and the Screen Saver and left it to its own devices. When I got back home nine hours later it had transferred a whole 164 megabytes!

After that I followed the instructions on the Apple discussion site, booted from the Leopard installer disk and chose to restore the entire disk from the Time Machine disk. Unfortunately, the only choices I was given were that morning (after the deletion) or the first of December 2007, even though it had been backing up hourly since October. So I had to quit out of that.

Luckily, the only thing I'd done right that day was to stop my iPod syncing, so after downloading Senuti (best $18 I ever spent!) I was able to restore 99% of my stuff and then dragged the remainder from the correct Time Machine backup.

So, to recap: Shirt Pocket––I hate you all, until you release version 2.5 then I'll love you all

[patrickm]

What's going to be interesting is how SuperDuper handles permissions. When backing up, it repairs permissions first and as you all know, that could take hours. Ever since Leopard came out, repairing permissions has been a nightmare. For some odd reason it takes forever. I even have Cocktail and it takes longer than usual to repair permissions. Tiger wasn't like that. I found that Apple really doesn't care to address the issue. They're really useless when it comes to support (arrogant jerks).
Don't give up hope. I too suffer from "OMG, I have no backup". Time Machine seems a waste of "time" and I much prefer SuperDuper over anything else.
I'm taking my chances and waiting. It's well worth it.

PS: Finally, I became a member here. Not sure what the problem was but I had to use another email. My first time showed me logged on but I couldn't post. I wasn't even in the members list. Glad I got that fixed.

patrickm

[dnanian]

Well, we (and Cocktail) just ask OSX to repair permissions for us. We don't do it ourselves -- as such, it'll be slow, because Leopard does it slowly.

[jazzimus]

Originally Posted by dnanian

Well, we (and Cocktail) just ask OSX to repair permissions for us. We don't do it ourselves -- as such, it'll be slow, because Leopard does it slowly.

I takes the same time in Cocktail... it just calls out repair permissions via a terminal command. The SUID errors still take time to pass. I suggest you just turn off repair permissions in the backup sequence.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306925

[patrickm]

That's funny. Apple says the SUID errors are accurate but no cause for concern. Then why even report it? Why not just eliminate permission repairing for SUID? Maybe this is the reason it takes forever to repair permissions.
Fixin' something that doesn't need fixin' doesn't make sense. I repair my permissions at least once a week, if I need it or not. It's just something I do on a weekly basis. With Leopard, I guess that will change to once a month.

[stokessd]

You may have some sort of an issue with time machine or you external drive. I'm copying 4.13 gig from time machine via wireless N from my server and it's saying that it will take 2 hours. In the time it took to write these couple sentences it has copied 134 meg.

Sheldon

[macWish]

I reported the slow repair of permissions under Leopard to Apple Bug Reported Dec 8th. I finally got a reply on Jan 8th saying my report was a duplicate and engineering is working on it. Have not heard anything more about the state of the Bug, but will post here if I learn anything more.

The original bug report is Bug ID #5603577

[macWish]

Update from Apple Development Connection on Repair Permissions Bug in Leopard:

"Thank you for contacting us regarding the status of Bug ID# 5603577, the original of your duplicate Bug ID# 5637099.

At this time, there isn't any new information available for this issue. I have checked with engineering, and the issue is still being investigated.

We will do our best to keep you informed as new information becomes available. Please be sure to regularly check the release notes for potential or related fixes that might affect this issue.

We sincerely appreciate your patience and thank you for your support."

[justflybob]

And people here and on the blog actually bust Dave N.'s chops for not posting daily updates?

Give me a break! If Apple, with teams of sw engineers pouring over this same material, cannot figure out an annoying permissions problem, just how the heck is Dave supposed to unravel another bug when Apple itself throws his team a curve ball with the API?

Also, I'm an admitted conspiracy junkie (currently in rehab), but knowing how often I got thrown under the bus at the last minute on Apple hw releases? It makes me wonder if somewhere in the bowels of Apple, someone decided to through Dave a curve on the 10.5 release, with no other purpose than to slow him down so they could launch Time Capsule. Apple has always shown a bit of disdain for cloning drives, as they figure people will steal the OS and not pay for their own copy.

An ugly thought, but a thought none-the-less...

[dnanian]

Apple wouldn't do that, justflybob: no way, no how.