Are these back up programmes better than doing this? If so why?
When backing up systems, they keep track of everything including all of the invisible files. When you restore you get a computer that's exactly like the way it was when last backed up... all custom settings, icons, sharing privileges etc exactly they way you left them. This saves tons of time reconfiguring everything if you ever have to recover from a major disk failure.
For incremental backups of something like a partition full of images, a program like Retrospect keeps track of just which files have changed since you last backed up and copies only those to the backup set. It also makes a "snapshot" of what the partition looks like at the time of the back up. When you restore from a backup set you have all of these snapshots to choose from. Usually you'd want the latest, but you might want for some reason to restore the partition to exactly what it looked like two weeks ago. Retrospect uses the snapshot to find all of the appropriate files from the many versions in its backup set and automatically rebuilds the partition to look exactly like it did at the time the snapshot was made. Trying to construct these kind of rebuilds...even of the most recent versions... manually is a royal pain. When you've had some sort of disaster and need to recover, the last thing you want is more aggravation trying to get things back to just they way they were. Doing it manually you invariably leave bits and pieces out and you'll be fighting the recovery for days. With an automated backup system you can be back to exactly the state of the last backup very quickly and relatively painlessly.
Maybe you don't have a hard disk crash but for some reason your Photoshop configuration has gone crazy and nothing is working quite like it should. You can use one of the snapshots to restore just your Photoshop program files to exactly the versions that were in place a week ago when everything was working properly. A very useful tool to have in the bag.
I don't mean to come off like a Retrospect sales person, but I've seen too many people suffer all kinds of angst over something like a hard drive crash when a relatively simple backup strategy could have had them back up and running completely within a couple of hours or less. Instead they spend days trying to manually reassemble and reconfigure piles of files and software without ever quite getting back to what they had when disaster struck. I think Murphy's law says that one of these disasters is never going to happen when you have plenty of spare time to get things going smoothly again.
Bob Smith
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