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Best backup software?
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Severed Hand of Skywalker
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May 5, 2005, 06:45 PM
 
I need some software that weekly mirrors my home folder onto another hard drive AUTOMATICALLY.

I know of retrospect and Data Backup but they both seem to get lots of bad reviews.

Also Apples Backup is ok but confusing, I don't know if it just backs-up what is needed or delete and replace everything ever time.

Any suggestions?

"Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh"
     
kcmac
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May 5, 2005, 07:32 PM
 
Look at SuperDuper.
     
workerbee
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May 6, 2005, 02:09 AM
 
Synk used here...
MBP 15" 2.33GHz C2D 3GB 2*23" ACD
     
honz
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May 6, 2005, 03:01 AM
 
I created a workflow in Automator to backup my iTunes and iPhoto library for me, saved as a plugin - iCal alarm.
     
Morpheus
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May 6, 2005, 03:08 AM
 
Another vote for Synk.
     
wataru
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May 6, 2005, 03:53 AM
 
I'd just use rsync if I were you.
     
sworthy
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May 6, 2005, 03:53 AM
 
Synk here as well. 30 day free trial as well. Support is personal and excellent!
     
Lee33
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May 6, 2005, 08:35 AM
 
SuperDuper

Another to consider is CCC (Carbon Copy Cloner). It's free and a lot of folks like it.
     
bells0
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May 6, 2005, 09:02 AM
 
Always used CCC and found it to work great. Put Tiger on my PM last night and tried to back up but it wouldn't work??
     
bbales
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May 6, 2005, 09:43 AM
 
Take a look at Chronosync as well. I'm not sure about the automatic part -- I've not tried that. And I've heard good things about SuperDuper, as mentioned above.
     
eggman
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May 6, 2005, 09:59 AM
 
I swear by Deja Vu, which is a GUI front end for psync.

You can schedule daily, weekly, monthly and manual backup events, it can copy volumes or folders... it can produce bootable volumes... and it can automatically mount remote volumes to copy to/from. It can run "preflight" and "postflight" scripts that you specify before/after your backups. The one thing it doesn't do is wake your computer up from sleep... but I have my Energy Saver panel do that in advance of its scheduled operation.

Deja Vu just added a feature called "Safety Net" that will save any of the deleted or updated files from a specified number of backups in a folder for recovery in case of emergency.
     
malcolm
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May 6, 2005, 10:50 AM
 
I use Retrospect, which does incremental backups, which I think is a feature you want. Maybe all the apps listed above do this, I don't know.
eggman - I like the look of Deju Vu, so I wouldn't mind hearing a bit more about it from a user:
1. does it do incremental backups?
2. does the back-up it makes, say on an ext. hard drive, LOOK like what it's backed up? My only beef with Retrospect is that I can't easily check the backup it's made, because it doesn't have the same Finder/folder configuration, at least not at first glance.
I'd love a backup that looks identical; but I also want a backup app that does just incremental backups (this is a big time-saver).
Cheers,
malcolm
     
BZ
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May 6, 2005, 10:58 AM
 
Another vote for Deja Vu which just got Tiger support, "Safety Net" archiving of changes and the ability to start when the computer is idle.

BZ
     
drive-thru
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May 6, 2005, 11:19 AM
 
Originally Posted by bells0
Always used CCC and found it to work great. Put Tiger on my PM last night and tried to back up but it wouldn't work??
Same thing here - checked the CCC website and they're working on the problem (issue with Authentication being changed for Tiger). However, the website also told me that I can clone a disk through Disk Utility, which I hadn't realised. It didn't tell me how, I had to find it myself (the Restore section), but it worked perfectly.
     
CatOne
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May 6, 2005, 12:05 PM
 
ChronoSync.

Been using it for 1.5 years, it's been flawless for incremental backups. Well more like "incremental dupes to an external firewire HD," but it's awesome.
     
malcolm
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May 6, 2005, 12:19 PM
 
CatOne,
What do you mean "incremental dupes", as against incremental backups?
malcolm
     
Randman
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May 6, 2005, 12:27 PM
 
Slight hijack:
I got a mini a couple of weeks ago, mainly for the missus but also to free up room on my PB (I saved about 44GB moving the music collection over.
So, here's my setup. I have a PB17 which is my main machine, the mini (with the music collection and a few apps I use infrequently) and an external HD.

Before the mini, I used CCC to clone the PB to the external then kept a few extra folders with videos, games apps I use but not that often, etc. I want to keep the external cloned but I'll probably clone it to the mini now since it has the music collection.
But I want to keep things as close to identical as possible between the mini and the PB, such as widgets, stuff I'm working on, etc. iSync does a fair bit but not enough.
Any suggestions?

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Aeschylus
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May 6, 2005, 06:27 PM
 
MimMac works great for a single computer. It will do bootable clones as well as incremental backups or syncs. it is one of the easiiest utilities to use (very intuitive) and is quick. Worked flawlessly for me, and it's cheap.
     
badtz
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May 6, 2005, 08:14 PM
 
Deja Vu is great, I've been using it for about 2 years.

Impression looks interesting [when it gets updated for Scheduled Backups].

The one thing I don't like about Deja Vu is that it doesn't show the complete path of the folders when you specify which folders you want backed up.

This is because the system preferences can't be re-sized. So the [width] space is limited.
     
eggman
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May 7, 2005, 01:16 AM
 
Originally Posted by malcolm
eggman - I like the look of Deju Vu, so I wouldn't mind hearing a bit more about it from a user:
1. does it do incremental backups?
2. does the back-up it makes, say on an ext. hard drive, LOOK like what it's backed up? My only beef with Retrospect is that I can't easily check the backup it's made, because it doesn't have the same Finder/folder configuration, at least not at first glance.
I'd love a backup that looks identical; but I also want a backup app that does just incremental backups (this is a big time-saver).
Incremental backups? Well, sorta. Up until yesterday the answer would have been "no" because what Deja Vu does is sync folders or volumes... which perfectly satisfies your second condition... the destination ends up looking identical to the source (that is, if you specify that it should delete files on the destination that do not exist in the source, which is an option).

Up until the last release of Deja Vu there were no increments: if you needed to find that file in the state it existed in three days ago, prior to the your nightly backups... you were out of luck.

But this new "Safety Net" feature addresses that very issue, cleverly I think. When Deja Vu is about to update a destination file - or delete one - it can save that into a ZIP archive stored in a special "Safety Net" directory. You can indicate how many of these archives you want it to keep around, so you might elect to keep the last 7 days of overwritten or deleted files.

The ZIP file preserves the directory structure of the folder or volume you are backing up, so it'd be easy to pick out any files you need to recover.

To me this represents the best of both worlds. My primary interest in having nightly backups is to be able to weather a catastrophic disk failure and not lose more than a day's saved work product. At any point I can boot from my backup drive... whereas with many incremental backup solutions, you have to do some kind of "restore" operation from an archived file of the full disk... and then successively apply however many increment deltas to the full restore to get you back up and running. Since I'm not using streaming tape to back up onto, I'm just as happy not to use a model that evolved around the properties of streaming tape!

Having said that, I am happy that Deja Vu is now offering an option to preserve files that would have been lost in syncronization. That really is an attractive "safety net" option.

Deja Vu lets me do fully bootable weekly clones of my entire disk and nightly updates of my business' documents root directory and my email folder. And now I can even pick out snapshots of files overwritten a few days ago....

...like I said, best of both worlds.
     
cms7912
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May 7, 2005, 10:48 AM
 
Ditto for Synk! I even trust it for my mother and sister's backups to my server.

Clint
     
Charles Bouldin
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May 7, 2005, 03:24 PM
 
One more vote for Super Duper. Simple. Works.
     
badtz
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May 8, 2005, 05:18 AM
 
it looks like SuperDuper can't do scheduled backups? true?

ALSO

Does anyone have any comments about "Impression"?

I really like the fact that it can backup over multiple CDs/DVDs, and in the upcoming version 3.0, the developer will be adding scheduled backups .... which will essentially make it feature on-par with the other backup apps ......


comments?
( Last edited by badtz; May 8, 2005 at 05:28 AM. Reason: add additional comments)
     
   
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