Why Time Machine if You Have SuperDuper

[ramonekalsaw]

Why would I want to use TimeMachine when I have SuperDuper? In comparison, TM seems redundant, and takes extra time and resources to manage.

What am I missing?

Thanks.

[dnanian]

Please see the "Time's Arrow" posts at the Shirt Pocket Blog, where I explain why they're both useful.

[sjk]

Originally Posted by ramonekalsaw

Why would I want to use TimeMachine when I have SuperDuper?

TM recently allowed me to recover nearly all of the substantial, time consuming Address Book changes I'd made and then triggered a bug that kept AB from opening properly. It was still easy enough to remember and redo the few others from there.

It's the first and only time I've needed a TM backup but whatever time and resources it had used up to then were worth even that single payoff compared to how much burden it would have been to attempt recreating an entire loss of changes.

[dnanian]

Yep. There are definitely things (AB is one) that TM works very well with (and have specific support for it, too)...

[GrayFox]

Here is what happened to me one time...

Evidently the OS become corrupted in a way that would
cause a reboot to fail, but the machine still ran.

When Super Duper cloned the main disk it copied the
corruption to the backup.

When I reboot the machine and it failed, I tried rebooting
from the SuperDuper clone which also failed.

I had to restore the OS from the Distribution CD and then pull
files from the backup disk.

I *think* Time Machine would allow one to *possibly* go back
far enough to escape the corruption.

Jerry

[dnanian]

No, it wouldn't, Jerry. The way to recover from that would be to clean install OSX, then - when prompted to 'copy from another Mac', you can either restore from TM or from SD... basically, the same thing.

[xbytor]

This is a relatively fresh and related thread, so I'll post here...

Originally Posted by dnanian

The way to recover from that would be to clean install OSX, then - when prompted to 'copy from another Mac', you can either restore from TM or from SD... basically, the same thing.

Useful info. Thanks. I gather, however, that doing a restore from TM could be a painfully long process.

I have one other scenario. My current config for my System/Apps drive is to have TM do it's hourly incremental thing and have SD run twice a day. I have had cases where my primary drive failed and I had to boot of the SD drive to fix things. Work great.

My question is what is the best way to pick up any incremental changes from TM since the last SD sync? My first approach would be to run find(1) to locate any files on the TM volume that had been modified/created since my last SD sync. This would make it easier to recover stuff like my mailboxes and what-not that happen to be stored on the same drive. It would also make tracking down the problem that caused the crash if it were, in fact, a software problem.

Any ideas?

BTW, I keep all of my other work files on a set of mirrored/snapshotted/rsync'd ZFS drives. My backup needs there are quite a bit different and it's a lot more data to deal with.

[dnanian]

You could try going into TimeMachine and searching by date - might give you useful info...

[xbytor]

Originally Posted by dnanian

searching by date...

Ah. OK. I didn't know about the time parameters to Spotlight searches. Unfortunately, I don't use Spotlight so I may be out of luck here. Thanks for the tip, though.

[terryf]

Belt n Braces?

[xbytor]

Originally Posted by terryf

Belt n Braces?

Some call it 'paranoia'.

I can say, though, that I've never lost more than an hour of work even in the face of multiple system/user failures. Sometimes recovery took more than an hour, however.

[terryf]

Not paranoia, peace of mind ())