hardrive question...

you know how they have time machine, super duper, and ccc as back up programs..... if i were to run super duper, would i need 2 seperate external hardrive for time machine and super duper? and whats the difference between reboot and back up? because i read about, how time machine cant reboot your mac but super and ccc are able too. I always thought back up and reboot were the same thing lol

Here's how I have mine setup to run:

1. One hard drive dedicated to doing Time Machine backups. Note that TM backups are not bootable, however, when reinstalling OS X to do a clean install for whatever reason, a TM backup works best.

2. I use another separate hard drive to clone backup with Carbon Copy Cloner. This is handy because the drive is bootable and if my hard drive ever fails unexpectedly, I can boot from the external and press on until I replace the internal drive.

You can forgo the two hard drives and just use one for Time Machine. If you ever need to replace the internal hard drive, you can boot your machine with the original install media after replacing the bad drive. During the install process, you'll be asked if you have a TM backup. Just attach the TM drive and it'll automatically do a complete restore to the new drive.

Your choice.

chscag said:

Here's how I have mine setup to run:

1. One hard drive dedicated to doing Time Machine backups. Note that TM backups are not bootable, however, when reinstalling OS X to do a clean install for whatever reason, a TM backup works best.

2. I use another separate hard drive to clone backup with Carbon Copy Cloner. This is handy because the drive is bootable and if my hard drive ever fails unexpectedly, I can boot from the external and press on until I replace the internal drive.

You can forgo the two hard drives and just use one for Time Machine. If you ever need to replace the internal hard drive, you can boot your machine with the original install media after replacing the bad drive. During the install process, you'll be asked if you have a TM backup. Just attach the TM drive and it'll automatically do a complete restore to the new drive.

Your choice.

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Toast mannnnnn!!!!!!!!!That is what i neededdddddd righttt thereeeee ^^^^^^^^

I use one external partitioned for T.M. and SD!

What with hard drives being so stupid cheap these days, why not have have two? A bootable backup and a TM backup. Twice the protection.

chas_m said:

What with hard drives being so stupid cheap these days, why not have have two? A bootable backup and a TM backup. Twice the protection.

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Excellent advice!

My only reason for the one drive/two partitions is we have to do everything on the cheap right now because of how tight money is. We got the external (500GB) last year and are happy with it. All I cared about was enough space for a bootable, sufficient number of T.M. backups to choose from, and FW800 connection.

I'm sure that same drive (or even larger) would be even cheaper today. Oh well...

At least now I can show my husband that I am not crazy for having both a CCC backup and a TM backup. Or at the very least that I am not alone in my insanity.

Great advice! Thanks.

roguestatus978 said:

you know how they have time machine, super duper, and ccc as back up programs..... if i were to run super duper, would i need 2 seperate external hardrive for time machine and super duper?

Click to expand...

No, but as stupid cheap as hard drives are this would be a very good idea.

But just to answer this question authoritatively:
SuperDuper, Time Machine, and Bulletproof Backups — Shawn Blanc
(scroll way down to where the heading "Time Machine and Super Duper" is)

and whats the difference between reboot and back up? because i read about, how time machine cant reboot your mac but super and ccc are able too. I always thought back up and reboot were the same thing lol

Click to expand...

You're using the wrong terminology. "Reboot" is just another term for restarting the computer: neither Time Machine nor Super Duper/CCC do that.

What you probably meant was "what's the difference between a bootable backup and a Time Machine backup?" and the answer is simply that Time Machine backups are easily RESTORABLE, but they are not BOOTABLE. This means that if you hard drive suddenly died, you could not restart your Mac and run it from the Time Machine drive -- you'd have to boot from a BOOTABLE source (like your system CD) and THEN restore files using Time Machine, which works great.

Super Duper and CCC, on the other hand, create a bootable *clone* of your hard drive: identical in every way, including its ability to be booted up. So if your original hard drive died, you could quickly reboot the machine from your clone drive and start up much faster, and thus begin the recovery process much faster.

I thoroughly recommend doing both: a bootable backup (ie a clone), and a Time Machine backup. I personally keep them on separate drives, but as shown above you don't have to.

Time Machine is just the best when it comes to selective file retrieval or pulling a old revision of a file "back in time" to the present. Technically you can do this with CCC/SD but in practice, there's no contest TM is far superior.

A full restore with Time Machine is also a perfectly good way to restore; it will just take a bit longer than it would with a clone restore because you have to have a third source (ie your system disks or something) to boot from.

Clone backups are quicker, and serve other purposes: sometimes its nice to start up from a clone to try and troubleshoot an issue on your boot drive, or to run maintenance on it; a clone is also useful for doing what I call the "nuke and pave" defragmenting of a drive*.

*Mac drives don't generally need defragging; I use this technique more to test an aging HD drive than I do to "gain" any temporary "optimisation."

Hope that clears things up.