On Apr 8, 2009, at 12:42 PM, aussieshepsrock wrote: >
> I've never ever touched, seen, or used Timemachine before, but have > a year or two of trust and experience with SuperDuper. Should I stick > with that or give TimeMachine the job? Can it use a drive physically > smaller than the internal drive in his G4? His drive has less than > 40gig used and I know SuperDuper is OK with smaller drives holding the > dupe of the original, but larger drive. Time Machine is really designed for people who don't already have a secure backup strategy in place. It will work fine with a backup drive smaller than his built-in, but be aware it is an incremental backup, and keeps older versions of files as well...you're likely to run out of space unless the Time machine volume is at least a couple-three times larger than his used space. > The backup is kept 'offline' completely unplugged from anything > unless being updated or 'rescuing' a problem situation. Does this > influence TimeMachine's usability? Well, so far as backing up, no, but this kills the easy restore feature of TM pretty well . Time machine IS designed to be always on. > I run SuperDuper on a manual basis > on a fairly regular basis and my father backs up his snapshots from > iphoto regularly on his own. If what's working aint' broke, I wouldn't rush to fix it. The best, gold-plated, strategy, imo is to use both. One SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner volume (or volume set, for proper backup rotations), for offsite-able, bootable backups, and an always-on, always-connected TM volume for those "Oh crap I didn't mean to <make irrevokable change to a file or folder>" moments. A Time machine volume will allow you to restore from a TM volume, even though you can't boot from one. The drawbacks are it's not bootable, and maintaining a rotating backup (offsite and onsite) isn't nearly as easy. In theory, you should be able to to have two Time Machine volumes with the same name, stop time machine, swap them, restart time machine and have it go on, but I haven't tried that yet. The drawbacks with SuperDuper/CCC are that (unless you set them up this way) they're not automatic, and maintaining the kind of 'going back in time' stuff that Time Machine lets you do is much more difficult. Frankly I've used my Time Machine backups in both fashions...to completely restore (about 1% of the time, or rather, *once*) and to retrieve earlier/accidentally changed/accidentally erased versions of files (about 99% of the time). In our larger systems practice here (in this case using our tape backups and Windows Server's Shadow Volume Copy) it's pretty much the same kind of ratio. Restoring a single file or group of files is 99% of our restore work, rather than rebuilding servers. -- Bruce Johnson University of Arizona College of Pharmacy Information Technology Group Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed Low End Mac's G3-5 List, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list?hl=en Low End Mac RSS feed at feed://lowendmac.com/feed.xml -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
