Superduper questions

cool11 · February 14, 2007 7:20AM

I used superduper to clone my mbp internal hd.

I thought it would take less time the whole backup.

It took 2 hours to take my hard disk backup. All files, about 35gb were occupied from my application and data.

I had an external hd for these backups, 7200rpm, usb2. Superduper displayed effective copy speed about 7mb/sec.

Is it normal to make 2 hours to take the backup?

If my system crashes and do not even boot, how can I tell mac to boot from the cloned os in external hard disk?

Are the incremental/smart backups safe or it is better to take full backups only?

Do you have any personal experience on these tasks?

ireland · February 14, 2007 7:29AM

I you want to do efficient back ups, if you buy the app and choose Smart backups, from now on your times will be down below 30 minutes. If you turn on your Mac when have your external HD turned on and plugged into USB, you press alt, and you can choose external.

cool11 · February 14, 2007 12:16PM

I saw the contents of external backup disk. It contains exactly what the original internal disk has.

I wonder, is this a simple copy paste task? I think it could not be. There must be hidden files or something else. I mean the ghost backup in windows has its own format and I thought superduper would do the same.

What is going on?

mikef · February 14, 2007 12:28PM

SuperDuper creates a bootable clone of the original disk. It can also (optionally) create disk images.

Why do you want it to be more complex?

cool11 · February 14, 2007 12:31PM

I do not want it complex!

I just want to know what's happening. Maybe the windows make me think that way.

mikef · February 14, 2007 12:35PM

As Ireland mentioned, the main appeal of Super Duper is the smart backup capability. After creating the initial disk clone, it will only update the files that have changed since the last backup.

Drag and drop of your files will work, but the resultant copy won't be bootable.

Marvin · February 14, 2007 1:10PM

Superduper usually takes quite long for me too but I think it took about 1 hour for 30GB. 2 hours seems a bit much. I've seen 190GB done in 2 hours 45 mins. This seems longer than a Finder copy as you'd be able to do maybe 1GB per minute to a firewire drive. So Superduper appears to be going at half speed but copy speeds tend to slow down the more files you have. Typical systems have in the region of hundreds of thousands of files to copy so I'd say that the copy time is fairly reasonable.

Hard drives are quite a big bottleneck in computers these days, especially concerning virtual memory and large backups. It's about time we got some new technology in that sector.

mikef · February 14, 2007 1:15PM

If SuperDuper is doing any sort of copy verification, that might explain the half speed. Obviously, as you said, the higher number of small files, will slow it down significantly as well.

I have never really paid too close attention to the performance to my old Maxtor 7200rpm backup drive (connected by FW400) but it's not noticeably slow.

I'm very happy with SD as a product. It's one of the first OS X apps I bought after becoming a switcher in 2004.

kcmac · February 14, 2007 11:09PM

Yep. The first backup takes quite awhile based on the amount of info you have. My music files really take awhile. I have a firewire 400 hard drive. (Ministack. Man, I love that thing).

After that, the smart backup feature (you have to pay for SD to get this feature) takes about 5 minutes. I usually backup at least once a week.

cool11 · February 15, 2007 12:39PM

I always had the question how safe are incremental backups. Smart updates all these stuff.

Maybe it all depends on the application you use.

But is this true?

Is the whole backup better and safer(to be ok when you really need it) than these updated backups?

Any bad or good experiences?

mikef · February 15, 2007 12:57PM

I've had no reason to distrust incremental backups and they've existed since the day after full backups, so I don't think it's a concern.

If you're more comfortable doing a daily full backup, then the only thing you'd be giving up is time.

cool11 · February 15, 2007 4:13PM

Does superduper take backup to dvds? I searched but I did not find such an option.

mikef · February 15, 2007 4:20PM

No, it does not. You have the option to backup to a sparse disk image. You could use split from a Terminal session to split that into DVD-R sized chunks and write those to DVD-R. Not a great option, but an option nonetheless.

Backup to a hard drive or network share.

Superduper questions

Comments