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