I’ve been looking for a decent backup program for the Mac for a while. Every recommendation I’ve received has been either expensive and overblown with unnecessary features (e.g., .Mac) or mind-numbingly complicated (e.g., some French program I downloaded). For the near term, I’ve been copying my user files to my iPod and then transferring that data to the second (300 GB) drive on my desktop XP machine.
All that changed when I learned about a package called SuperDuper. This is a great little program which serves the single purpose of backing up your data without a huge hassle.
I have an external firewire drive, and when I run SuperDuper it duplicates (get it?) the contents of my iBook’s drive to the firewire drive. I can even boot from the firewire drive once the backups are complete.
My iBook’s hard drive has about 30 GB used on it, and it took about 35 minutes to back the entire thing up. By registering the package, you get the ability to perform incremental backups, so that only the changes to your hard drive are reflected in your backup image. That saves a big chunk of time in the backup process.
I’ve always been a proponent of purchasing really good shareware when I come across it. SuperDuper cost $19.95 and is worth every cent.