First, for those of us that already own SuperDuper (highly recommended), the update makes your installation Leopard compatible for the lovely price of $0.
Second, for those of you that haven’t yet bought SuperDuper, you can use the program for as long as you like for the staggering price of $0. However, if you end up purchasing the amazing application that has saved me on more than one occasion, you also get the SmartUpdate (very quick updates) and Scheduling (very automatic updates) features of SuperDuper enabled for a low $27.95. That’s money well spent.
Now that you know its available, go download the free trial! In the mean time, I want to revisit the Time Machine vs. SuperDuper debate that I brought up in my previous post.
To be honest, for the last three months, I have been using Apple’s much touted Time Machine. However, when I say I’ve been using it, I mean that it has been backing up my computer in the background for the last 3 months. Sure, this provided me with my much needed (and much recommended) comfort of knowing that my data is secure. However, I cannot honestly say that I have ever used Time Machine to find a file from the past and bring it back to the present.
While I will be the first to agree that maybe Time Machine is one of those things you don’t know you need, before you need it. Sure, that’s quite a possibility, and its definitely the reason I’m going to give Time Machine some more, well, time. However, when I look back on the last three months, I see that the only time that I ever opened Time Machine was either to 1) tell Time Machine to stop making backups of my Parallels Drive or 2) to show it off to my friends.
The first reason was simply because Time Machine backs up my 10GB Parallels drive image each time I run Parallels, which ends up taking a whole lot of room. So I deleted the previous copies several times before realizing that I could just tell Time Machine to ignore that folder (under System Preferences –> Time Machine –> Options). The second is self explanatory, and quite fun, but not necessarily useful. But in the end, that’s all I’ve used it for.
Therefore, if this trend continues, Time Machine is not by any means more useful than SuperDuper. In fact, a complete system restore (knocks on wood) would take longer using Time Machine as opposed to SuperDuper, as we saw in my previous post.
So that’s my 3 month report with Time Machine. I’ll report back in another 3 months with Time Machine, SuperDuper!, and Time Capsule. Should be interesting. For now though, SuperDuper wins in my eyes.