Are you a SuperDuper User? Are you also a Moron?

Ok, so that was a bit punchy to get your attention. After reading several articles and listening to several podcasts that do not understand how Time Machine works, it’s time for an explanation. SuperDuper is a fine solution for cloning a drive, however, just because it makes a bootable clone, does not mean it should be considered a viable replacement for Time Machine.

Misconception #1: Time Machine backups aren’t a clone of your hard drive. This is just wrong. Several SuperDuper users are pushing this out as a reason for why Time Machine sucks. Well, ok, um, it’s not a BOOTABLE clone, but it’s a clone none the less. As a matter of fact, it’s an HOURLY updated clone of your hard drive.

Misconception #2: It’s not possible to do a full system restore from a Time Machine backup. This misconception came from The MacCast 5/11 Episode. As a big fan of The MacCast it’s important to understand that this not correct. When you boot to the Leopard DVD the option is given to restore rom a Time Machine backup in the Utilities Menu. For people who haven’t had to use this feature yet have missed something. Using your DVD to restore from a Time Machine backup will ERASE THE HARD DRIVE. Yes, you read that right, it erases your hard drive before it restores the data. This was discovered the hard way last week. Something happened on the MacBook Pro and had to hard reboot. When OS X restarted it would not initialize the desktop. After trying a few things, to get it back, it was decided to restore from the Time Machine Backup. This is both and example of where Time Machine kicks SuperDuper’s ass, but also where having both would have been beneficial. After booting to the Leopard DVD and starting the restore, it started by erasing the hard drive. Didn’t think anything of it at the time. But it would get me in an hour or two later.

After restoring, the MacBook Pro was back where it was about an hour or so before the rebooting problem started. This is exactly where Time Machine kicks SuperDuper’s ass. By using Time Machine, only about an HOUR of work was lost. AN HOUR! With SuperDuper the entire DAY would have been lost. Ok, so there it is. Losing an hour of work, versus a day. However, there was one caveat. VMWare is the way the MacBook Pro runs Windows. As a matter of fact, it has two different versions of Windows XP installed. One with Windows XP with Office 2003 and IE 6 and one with XP, Office 2007 and IE 7. This is used for testing websites, since Microsoft won’t let you use two versions of IE with Windows easily. The problem is because Time Machine backs up hourly, it was decided that backing up the GIGANTIC Virtual Hard DRives every time they changed would not be wise where hard drive space was concerned. Because of the way that Time Machine works, it would be silly, or so it was thought, to backup these files (10GB each) each time something was done in Windows. The image files would change each time the Virtual Machine was turned on, so it would cause Time Machine to back up those files in the hourly backup. As a result, that directory was excluded from the Time Machine backups. Therefore, a day was spent rebuilding those Windows XP installations.

Having a SuperDuper clone of the hard drive would have allowed quick retrieval of those Virtual Machines. But that was not to be. As was stated earlier, if SuperDuper was the only option, an entire day’s work would have been lost. So that clearly isn’t a viable option either.

So the suggestion is to use both if possible. If that’s not possible due to hard drive space, the suggestion is to use Time Machine as the backup is going to be more current. So this article isn’t to suggest that SuperDuper users are morons, but more to point out that SuperDuper does have it’s limitations when compared to Time Machine and vice versa. If you use Time Machine you have to make sure that you have a copy of the Leopard DVD with you if you want to restore. For desktop users this isn’t as much of an issue as it is for laptop users. If you are a SuperDuper user, don’t discount the power of Time Machine just because SuperDuper is what you are used to using.

Whichever solution you choose, pick a good external drive. Choose a Firewire 400 or 800 drive, the performance difference is great enough between these solutions and USB that you are going to notice it when you are backing up. The back ups will take much less time and will put less strain on your system when they do backup. The Other World Computing Mercury Elite and Mercury On-The-Go are great choices.