I’m one of those people who never ever backed-up their computer. Never. Didn’t even consider it. I only started because back-ups with Time Machine on Mac OSX was so damn easy that I would have been foolish not to. I’m not someone with an ungodly amount of music or photos or ripped TV shows so I bought a portable USB-powered Western Digital hard drive (WD even has this model up to 750G in size). This thing has been a total gem. I’ve had no problems with it, it doesn’t need external power so it just sits attached to my monitor, and it’s the size of an iPod so if I ever need to share enormous files with someone I just bring it with me.
Then, a few months ago, I started thinking about Time Machine and how I use it: never. I had never actually put Time Machine to use. Every important document I have is on Google Docs, all of my code is stored (with complete history) on github, and my music and photos were archived on my iPod. I really had no need for historical snapshots of my data.
What I did worry about was my computer breaking and needing to work on a loaner for several days or having it completely die, needing to buy a new machine, and spending a full day setting up the machine (In my mind, this event always occurs in the middle of a deadline or while pushing something into production).
Going from a salaried employee to a bill-by-the-hour contractor does a lot of things to you, one of them is always putting a clear dollar value on your time. Losing the ability to bill clients for several days is something I consider “very expensive”. Luckily, there’s a very cheap solution to my problem. It’s called SuperDuper.
The app is simple and phenomenal and well worth it’s $28USD price tag. Every day at noon it starts making an exact bootable duplicate of my hard drive. The first backup took about 90 minutes and daily ones take about 15 minutes. This means that if my hard drive or computer died right now I could plug my external drive into another computer and it would boot up and function exactly the same. It wouldn’t be as fast as my internal drive but it would definitely suffice until I got a replacement drive or computer. Hell, if I was traveling somewhere and I knew whomever I was visiting had a Mac, I could bring my whole computer just by bringing my external drive.
Anyways, I’ve really enjoyed using SuperDuper and thought I’d point it out.
An interesting post, as I use Time Machine, but I use it like a weekly backup. I plug in my external HDD every week or so and let Time Machine run, then unplug, so I’m not really using Time Machine the way Apple intended. All I want is an external backup of my HDD so don’t loose photos and music etc. (which are backed up online, but getting them from the sources can be a real pain). Think I’ll give SuperDuper another look.
You totally have me sold on this. I’m probably going to scrap time machine and switch to SuperDuper as well. Like you, I really don’t do anything that requires historical snapshots. Unlike you, I have a shit load of photos. but I have an other set of hard drives to manage those.
SuperDuper has saved me in the past. I had a laptop drive die but had a full clone handy.
There’s no harm in running Time Machine, too. You never know when you’ll accidentally rm some config file and wish you had an incremental backup.
I have Time Machine running on a wireless drive at the office, so there’s nothing to plug in or do.