Bicycle For Your Mind
SuperDuper! and Peace of Mind
SuperDuper Icon
Product: SuperDuper!
Price: $27.95
You need to have a backup of your main drive. Time Machine is nice but it is not enough. You need a complete bootable backup of your main drive. There are several products which let you do this. The two which get the most attention are:
- Mac Backup Software | Carbon Copy Cloner | Bombich Software available for $39.99, and,
- SuperDuper!
I must admit that I haven’t used Carbon Copy Cloner(CCC) in a long time, I used to, but now I use SuperDuper. I have heard good things about CCC. Users report that they are happy with the product and it does a good job of backing up their hard drive to a bootable drive. That is all you need.
SuperDuper does a great job for me. I switched to it sometime in 2015 and it has been working great for me since.
SuperDuper Window
I set it to “smart update” my internal drive to an external drive every other week and it does that. What is “smart update?” Only the files added/changed on the hard drive are backed up to the bootable backup drive. Takes a fraction of the time that a full backup would take. When it finishes, the backup drive is a mirror image of your internal drive. I run the process at night when I am sleeping.
Smart Update
The first time you backup, it takes a while since SuperDuper is engaged in making a mirror image backup of your internal hard drive to the external hard drive. It is copying all the files, and that depending on the size and usage of your internal drive is going to take a while. The incremental backups are a lot quicker.
Things Which Are Going to Happen
These are two things which are going to happen to you:
- You are going to die. Make sure that you tell the people you love that you love them. Make a will. Make arrangements for your funeral. You don’t want your loved ones to have to deal with that stuff when they are grieving for you.
- Your hard drive is going to die. Have backups. If your files are important, have multiple backup hard drives. Keep those drives dispersed in a few different locations.
I can’t help you with the first item on this list. However, for the second item, use Carbon Copy Cloner or Super Duper to make bootable backups of your hard drive.
Super Duper is recommended with gusto.
macosxguru at the gmail thingie.