[Ham-Mac] Back Up Lesson Learned on Christmas Eve

[John Bastin]

On Dec 26, 2009, at 20:55:25, Dick Kriss wrote:

> Needless to say SuperDuper saved me and I have little on no faith
> in the Time Machine for a total restore to new hard drive installed by
> Apple.  
> 
> My advice is do not relay totally on the Time Machine. Have another
> back up plan and I recommend SuperDuper. It saved my six on
> Christmas Eve.

I agree that it's not a good idea to rely on Time Machine as your only backup. I have TM connected and backing up my laptop hourly, *AND* I do a weekly full bootable backup to a different external drive using SuperDuper! That drive goes off-site; I use two different external drives for this and alternate them every week.

But I do want to say that your experience with a TM restore isn't typical. I bought this new laptop on Labor Day, brought it home, started it up and selected the option to copy files from my TM backup. It went flawlessly and I had everything on the new computer in a couple of hours. It all worked just fine. (Caveat: I don't backup my Parallels disk images with TM. I re-installed Parallels and my Windows volumes on the new computer.)

Whether you're doing a full backup with SuperDuper! or backing up with Time Machine, you should periodically check your backup to make sure it's really a good backup. I boot my laptop from the SuperDuper! backup drive to check it, and periodically do a System install and a Time Machine restore on another blank drive and use it to boot my computer, just to make sure everything's OK. Better safe than sorry.

Hope this helps.


John Bastin K8AJS
bastinj at gmail.com

MacBook Pro 2.8GHz (17-inch)
4 GB RAM
500GB HDD
Mac OS X 10.6.2