SuperDuper! Alternatives

Paddy@CIRL

Hey guys,

I just bought another 2TB external drive to use to back up another 2TB drive I already had. It currently looks likes this :

iMac --> 2TB Main Drive --> 1TB Photograph Backup from 2TB Main Drive

What I want to do is :

iMac --> 2TB Main Drive --> 2TB Main Drive Mirror
iMac --> 1TB Time Machine for iMac internal HD

I've tried to use SuperDuper to do this but it won't allow me as the original drive is formatted FAT32 and SuperDuper needs the drive to be formatted OS Extended.

As the first HD is my primary copy of all my work, I'm a bit apprehensive to move it onto another drive, format it and move it back in case anything goes wrong.

Any ideas ?

Talisman

Are you concerned that you will lose a file when you copy from FAT32 to a Mac formatted drive?

Archive the content in .rar or .zip format. But don't do it all in one archive.

Paddy@CIRL

I ended up copying everything across, formatting the firewire drive to HFS+ and am currently in the process of moving everything back onto the Firewire drive before creating a mirror of it on the USB drive.

I think I'm going with Carbon Copy Cloner, which is entirely free and has got some positive reviews.

was.deevey

Carbon Copy kicks ass and saved my bacon may times.

Just make sure you boot off the drive once you are backed up and repair permissions (to be sure).

Matt Bauer

I used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone a Mac system to a new drive once. It created all kinds of problems that I did not notice until weeks later.

I have used SuperDuper to do the same thing about a dozen times, and it has performed 100% every time.

I strongly advise buying SuperDuper. It's not expensive, and more reliable than Carbon Copy Cloner.

was.deevey

I used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone a Mac system to a new drive once. It created all kinds of problems that I did not notice until weeks later.

What kinda probs? ... I'm on my fifth clone of my current install on this machine, 3rd clone of an imac, and 2nd of the GF's lappie without any issues on any of them ?

If i remember rightly I had issues with SuperDuper cloning correctly back on 10.3 going back a few years with that being my reason for using CCC in the first place.

BTW I'm using a heap of the usual pro software on the desktop and my macbook.

Matt Bauer

Carbon Copy Cloner introduced two problems specifically:

1. It messed up the boot partition. When I upgraded to Snow Leopard, it would not install as a result.

2. It created problems with the user ids, causing problems with some applications such as Adobe Photoshop constantly crashing.

I could fix the second problem by manually recreating the user account. The second problem required a reformat. I know it was CCC that introduced these issues, because I still had the old disk and could verify that none of these issues existed there. The only solution to the first problem was a complete reformat and restoring from backups.

Since that time, I have always used SuperDuper instead. That's why I would recommend it, but YMMV.

Paddy@CIRL

But alas, the drive being mirrored doesn't have an OS installed, it's just 1.3TB of photographs and design related work. I have it set to do a daily backup once a day and along with a Time Machine backup of my iMac I'm pretty covered !

Next is to start looking at off-site backups.