The Best Way To Backup A Mac? Send In The Clones.

kgoto said:

Intego PBX5 works fine for me under Leopard. The errors do not necessarily mean something was going wrong. They sometimes just tell you some notes about the files copied (or files not required to be copied). So, you need to give a close look at errors in PBX5 and they might be negligible.

Jared B. said:

Thanks Jan, I am going to get super duper right now. I really appreciate your feedback!

Jan Onik said:

Intego has problems, especially with Leopard. The ONLY two utilities to use to clone your Mac are the free Carbon Copy Cloner, and, of course, SuperDuper! Both are fast, after the first clone, and give the fewest errors. It took SuperDuper! months to come out with a version for Leopard, and it rocks.

Here’s the true way to test your clones. If you’re using SuperDuper! then set it to clone or incremental back up (Smart Back up), and to restart using the cloned hard drive to boot up. IF all goes well, you’ll see everything just like it was on your main hard drive but starting from the cloned hard drive.

What good is a clone if it doesn’t boot up? There’s a difference between backing up files and cloning a hard drive. It’s better to do both, unless your files are not worth much and you enjoy re-installing OS X and all your programs.

Jared B. said:

o.k I tried to do a clone on my Mac Pro from my main drive in bay one to my second drive in bay 2 that needs to be put to some use.

I believe in Itegos persona back up x5. I have been using there software for almost two years.

I started the clone and all was going fine. I got about 30% of the way through and started getting errors. It got to 16 errors and I shut it down. What could I be doing wrong? Is normal to get a few errors while cloning, has anyone else seen this. After I shut down the clone process I checked my main drive for permissions and got no permissions problems, then I verified the main drive and all checked out.

Any Idea’s. I know someone is going to tell me I need a different cloning program (figures right after I upgraded my intego personal back x4 (not leopard compatible)  to personal back up x5 (leopard compatible). HELP!!!

P.S. Personal back up had options to repair permissions after the cloning was complete and I had that checked. Should I have just let it go?

Farrar said:

You can set CCC so it will save copies of stuff you’ve discarded on your working drive. It puts the discarded stuff with date in a separate archive alongside your clone.  I’ve been using it for several months and it works fast and well.  No problem booting from the clone on a Firewire drive.

Jared said:

I use Intego’s personal back up x5. I believe you get what you pay for. It will cost you $49.00 but it plain out works. It did a fine job when I took out my stock 250 gig drive to replace it with a 500 gig drive on my Mac Pro. The program is very user friendly, I was trying to make a bootable clone off of a new hard drive that had no guid partition on it. Personal back up x5 popped up a message and told me what I need to do in order to continue.

Welles said:

I use SuperDuper! for daily Smart Updates and TimeMachine for what I consider ‘version’ backups. I’m not so worried about corrupt files as I haven’t had one in memory but will change my mind several times during creative projects and like TM for literally going back in time.

One FYI about SuperDuper!. Leopard users should double check and make sure that their clone is both bootable and applications launch. A quick selection of Mail, iCal, a browser etc will suffice. For a small subset of SuperDuper! users will find that apps will crash and other strange stuff happens with their SD clone. It is a known problem and there is a script at the top of the General forum over at ShirtPocket Software which solves this issue.

It is a prebinding issue and for some unknown reason some few Macs running Leopard exhibit the problem. The solution will be incorporated into the next release of SD but for now it is easiest to add a script to run after the clone is finished in the Advanced Options panel.

Randy said:

I use Superduper to clone my drive, Mozy to backup offsite and Chronosync to sync important folders. On Chronosync’s web site they mention that version 4 will support cloning of a drive. A public beta should be available soon according to the site. Looking forward to it.