Tiger Prep Advice

[jacebc]

In advance of Tiger, I'm trying to get my back-ups in order, and I think SuperDuper! will help me get it together.

I will be backing up two PowerBooks to an external FireWire drive. My plan is to partition the drive into three shares (PB1 Clone, PB2 Clone, and Data). I would then use SuperDuper to backup all files for each PB. This would then leave me with a bootable clone I could use in the advent of problems.

I would then perform Smart Updates on some sort of regular basis.

So, does this make sense? Thanks for any advice and pointers.

/Jason

[dnanian]

Yep, makes perfect sense... not sure what advice to give in addition, in fact...! Any particular questions?

[jacebc]

I guess I was just wondering if it made sense and I missed anything. I won't be taking advantage of the Safety Clone feature, but it doesn't seem like it would be needed for my work habits.

[dnanian]

Yep -- that's about all you're missing there. I think you'll do just fine!

[sjk]

In addition to the bootable clones, you could also back up your most frequently changing data (maybe even your entire home directory) more often to sparse images on the Data volume.

For example, on my iMac I have a separate /Users volume that I back up to a sparse image more often than my boot volume. And I back up mail and some other files to a sparse volume on a different FW drive even more often.

That's a partial picture. After I've finished fully automating everything (probably soon after 2.0 is released) I'll post a more detailed explanation. Hopefully other folks will also post their SD! usage scenarios so we can learn from each other.

[dirt farmer]

Greetings, it's me again.. I have now had SupeDupe for about 6 hours. I think I'm finally figuring out the whole Safety clone complex. Here is a question I have: I set up my external hardrive into two partitions, one for a bootable clone, and a smaller one for safety clone. However, after analyzing how this system works, am I okay to just make it all one safety clone partition? It seems like I am wasting a partition otherwise. If I'm reading this right, a safety clone is virtually a bootable clone of my system, mirroring my user and app files. It also acts as sort of a "scratch" sytem, to test the integrity of system updates, etc.

So, how do the pros use this? Do they have only one partition (safety) on external drives, or two, as mentioned above? Does it really matter?

Thanks again from a very green newbie (I bought my very first computer 5 months ago, but I'm catching on very, very quickly!)

[frico]

Originally Posted by jacebc

In advance of Tiger, I'm trying to get my back-ups in order, and I think SuperDuper! will help me get it together.

I will be backing up two PowerBooks to an external FireWire drive. My plan is to partition the drive into three shares (PB1 Clone, PB2 Clone, and Data). I would then use SuperDuper to backup all files for each PB. This would then leave me with a bootable clone I could use in the advent of problems.

I would then perform Smart Updates on some sort of regular basis.

So, does this make sense? Thanks for any advice and pointers.

/Jason