Here are some articles that came out last year on Mac backup software.
This article
<http://blog.plasticsfuture.org/2006/03/05/the-state-of-backup-and-
cloning-tools-under-mac-os-x/>
primarily explores the issues in Mac backup software, but does take a
look at basic copying tools, while this article,
<http://blog.plasticsfuture.org/2006/04/23/mac-backup-software-harmful/>
did a comparison and rating of every piece of Mac backup software
that I had
ever heard of (and some that I hadn't until then).
The latter article rates Retrospect "avoid at all costs", Carbon Copy
Cloner
(version 2) is "not recommended", and Super Duper is "Highly
recommended".
I've used each of these, and I agree with the first and last
rankings, but
would say that Carbon Copy Cloner (version 2, I have no experience yet
with the just released version 3) was OK. My primary issues with
Carbon Copy
Cloner was that the boot drives it made were slow to be recognized, and
you could not use it with the early updates of OS X 10.4 without a
tedious
workaround.
SuperDuper! supposedly preserves all the metadata file attributes, while
the others miss things of varying importance. It has always worked
for me,
and the thing I like best about it is that the paid version has a
"smart copy"
feature, which updates a previous clone by only modifying the files
that have
changed since the last backup. This is so much faster than
completely cloning
the drive all over again.
I would be very interested in hearing anyone's experience with the
new version
of Carbon Copy Cloner. In particular, the announcement page says
that it can
do a block copy of one drive onto another one, and that
"synchronization is built in,
not tacked on", which may mean that it now better preserves metadata
and can do
incremental updates the way SuperDuper! can.
David
On TueSep 18, 2007, Tom Piwowar wrote:
I¹ve been using Retrospect... I had thought I¹d be
able to boot my computer from this drive, but when I tried it...
What does it take to make a drive bootable?
Need to copy all the OS files (many of them invisible) and get
their permissions right. With OS X this is a very tricky thing to
get right. I have always found Retrospect over-complex and
unrelaible. Carbon Copy Cloner v3 is out today. Nice price: free.
It is famous for doing it right.
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