At 11:30 PM -0500 3/11/2011, Anne Keller-Smith wrote:
OK, went to Staples today cuz I was passing it, a waste of time. They only
had USB drives. Did some googling and it looks like with an Intel Mac any
Firewire will do, and most USB will work but that's not optimum.
For an x86 Mac, either FW or USB will work just fine. I prefer FW
because it's faster and more reliable than USB.
I *strongly* recommend avoiding WD Passport drives. Bad history with
Macs there. See the threads on the CCC support forums for details.
Also was suggested to use SuperDuper to clone. I've always used Carbon
Copy Cloner. Comparisons? What do you guys like?
Either will work fine. I prefer CCC.
Besides being much more customizable, CCC supports versioning and its
rsync engine is more resilient / able to handle errors on twitchy
drives.
Also it said Time Machine doesn't create bootable drives. What the ... ?
Correct. TM pushes the data into a sparse disk image ( .dmg /
.sparseimage / .sparsebundle ). It is not a cloning tool. Apple
designed it primarily as a companion to their Time Capsule product -
a network storage server / WAP.
+ TM hooks directly into OS X, so it tracks modified files as
they're modified and pushes them to the backup archive hourly (if it
has access to that backup volume at the time). It's quite nice to
have running in the background if you're doing critical work that you
want backed up all the time. ...Note that you can get perhaps
better protection if you have your work files in a Dropbox folder.
Then Dropbox keeps every change mirrored into the Amazon cloud
*immediately* after they're made, no hour wait.
+ TM has a nice browser that allows you to peruse the backup, to
pick out old file versions to be restored. (CCC has the same
versioning but no pretty browser; you have to use Finder).
- TM does not produce bootable volumes. So to recover a system, you
have to boot on your OS X DVD and tell it to do a restoration -- a
process that can take hours and hours.
- TM can be very fragile, corrupting its indices and/or archives.
This most commonly occurs when TM is automatically trimming /
deleting the old versions of files in order to make more room on the
backup volume. Apple's official fix is to re-initialize the volume
-- which blows away your backup.
HTH,
- Dan.
--
- Psychoceramic Emeritus; South Jersey, USA, Earth.
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