Filed under: Security, Utilities, Macintosh, Commercial
SuperDuper! Mac backup app offers super duper speed increase
by Jason Clarke Oct 14th 2009 at 8:00AM
Shirt Pocket released an update to its Mac backup software package SuperDuper! today, and though it's only a minor version number revision, it's a major speed improvement. The software company announced on their blog that, while they understated the speed increase on the official announcement (there they only claimed a 2x increase), during their in-house testing they were seeing speed increases of about 3x over how long it was previously taking to do an incremental update of a backup set.
If you're a Mac user and you're not aware of SuperDuper!, you should be. It's a backup program that creates a complete drive image of your Mac's drive, then on a schedule can keep the image up to date using incremental backups. This means that once I had created the image, I could keep my Mac's backup up to date by letting SuperDuper! update my drive image overnight. Typically this takes about an hour on my machine, and if Shirt Pocket's blog is to be believed, that number will drop down to about 20 minutes.
What's cool about this way of doing a backup is that if you are backing up to an external Firewire drive, you can actually use Target Mode when booting your Mac and boot from the external drive in the event that your primary drive fails. This means that you are only out of commission momentarily, and if you are doing daily backups, you have only lost a maximum of one day's work.
If there's one Mac app that I wish I had a Windows equivalent for, it's SuperDuper!. Aside from the goofy name with the awkward exclamation point in it, SuperDuper! is by far the best workstation backup application I've ever used, and now it comes with 66% more oomph!
SuperDuper 2.6.2 is a free upgrade for existing users. A feature-limited free version is available that can make bootable clones, but can't do incremental updates. To do that, you'll need the full version, which costs $27.95US.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Alex said 11:01AM on 10-14-2009
or use the totally free Carbon Copy Cloner. I tried both, and CCC does the same, elegantly and fastly, at no cost, as its a donationware.
http://www.bombich.com/index.html
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Scruffy Bob said 1:56PM on 10-14-2009
Target Disk Mode has nothing to do with booting from an external drive. It basically lets another Mac see your Mac as an external drive. So you can access your Mac's internal drive without booting it up fully.
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Insomnic said 10:41PM on 10-14-2009
Carbon Copy Cloner is an excellent tool but it doesn't have the automated scheduling options and sparse image options that SuperDuper! is able to provide. It seems SuperDuper is a bit more reliable as well. I've tried both and spent the money on SuperDuper because it had options I prefer and wanted the reliability of SuperDuper's program. CCC had some bad reports on its first Leopard release. It's an excellent program but for reliability I'll spend the money SuperDuper.
@Scruffy: You are correct, and I think it was meant that Target Disk Mode allows copying an image back to a Mac (specifically the backup image from SuperDuper) very painless.
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