SuperDuper!
One thing I am making sure I do when I send my MacBook back to Apple to fix that annoying screen flicker is that the drive is backed up. Last time I sent the drive to Apple, I just used the good old fashioned Unix tar command to back up the /Users partition. That turned out to be annoying to deal with.
Meanwhile, I’ve taken advantage of the slow news time to catch up on my video podcasts. A program that I didn’t know about called SuperDuper! was featured on an episode of MacBreak. It’s basically a backup program for MacOS. It’s “shareware” as a lot of the features require payment, but the basic functionality is available for free! The functionality I need? Image my laptop drive for in case Apple decides to erase it.
I have a 320gb ATA/100 drive I picked up at Office Depot plugged into a USB adapter. Yes, I have a bare drive sitting on my desk (well, it is on the anti-static bag). It’s definitely bigger than my 60gb drive in my MacBook, but it works. Yes, I could have bought a proper enclosure, but bare hard drives are so much more useful to me. I can stuff them in one of the many PCs I have.
As you can see from the screenshot above, once you get it going, it gives you an overview of the whole process. It tells you exactly what it’s doing right now. The whole process is like that–very verbose screens that guide you though. I may be sending these guys $28 to use some of the other functionality, but I think I’ll wait until after Christmas and after I deal with the fine folks at Apple a second time over this screen flicker problem.
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Comment by Joe
I purchased SuperDuper over a year ago and I’m very satisfy. The Smart Update option saves you time specially with large HD. Restarting from the newly created back-up option is great when wanting to comfirm a perfect clone. SuperDuper updates are easy to install and the web site has plenty of information if you need it. Over all SuperDuper is a must have for every Mac owner.
Comment by Richard
There are other reasons to use SuperDuper! as well. Take a look at this article from earlier this year comparing backup applications.
http://blog.plasticsfuture.org/2006/03/05/the-state-of-backup-and-cloning-tools-under-mac-os-x/#more-9
Comment by Ian
Add me to the list of very satisfied SuperDuper customers - only discovered it fairly recently but it works like a charm, and smart update is great for maintaining the backup without needing to spend hours doing a full backup of the entire drive each time. Great program!
Comment by Ron
I’ve been using SuperDuper for 1 1/2 years - works very well. I bought it for the same reason you describe - my PowerBook was in need of major surgery and I wanted to back-up its 80GB disk. SD did this and then when my PowerBook was returned, I booted to the external drive where SD had made the disk image and then restored from it. Using the Firwire 800 port, this took less than 1 hour for a 55GB partition. NOTE:Partition the external drive before backing up!