Purchasing advice needed - backup strategies

[chuckbo]

I'm thinking of leaving Retrospect (which has been flaky for me for awhile), and I've heard very good things about Super Duper.

Before making the move, I hope someone can check out my backup strategy and confirms that it's consistent with Super Duper . Or how close can I come? What practices will I need to change if I use Super Duper?

I rotate backup drives daily, weekly, and monthly.
Monday through Friday, I backup changed files to a firewire drive, and I rotate back and forth between two drives (so I can keep one stored offsite). I don't backup applications or music or cache files. (I have a separate backup drive I just use for music files.) At the beginning of the month, it does a Full backup on each drive.

I rotate between two weekly backups and do that backup on Saturdays. It also just backs up changed files except for once every other month, it does a full backup. It does not backup applications or cache files.

Then on the first Sunday of every month, I have a drive that has a full backup scheduled, and it gets a complete copy of the Mac.

So what can you tell me -- will Super Duper do what I'm looking for?
Chuck

[dnanian]

We don't really do 'changed files' (only) backups, Chuck: while we'll only 'update' changed files on an existing full backup, we don't store 'delta sets' the way Retrospect does.

So, while we're happy to create multiple backups and have you rotate them, each is a full backup, being updated 'incrementally' with Smart Update.

[chuckbo]

But it only backs up changed files?
That's all I'm getting from Retrospect right now. (It seems like I've lost the capability in Retrospect to have a set of historical backups, so I'm not losing anything there.) Main thing is I don't want it to go through a full backup every time -- and I hear you that you do incremental backups, so that's good.

Does Super Duper do any file compression, or do I get the real file image? On one hand, I like that Retrospect does compression, because I get more on the drive. On the other hand, it makes it lots harder to use.

One other thing that I've always wished about Retrospect (that my version, at least, doesn't do). Are the results password-protected in any way? That is, if someone gets a copy of my backup drive, can they recover all of my files on their machine?

[dnanian]

We don't compress, and copy things exactly as they are on the source. The results are not password protected (unless you manually create a password protected disk image and back up to that, but I generally discourage it).

[chuckbo]

I downloaded the test version, and I was going to try it out.

I've got another question -- maybe I'm missing something. I see the option to copy my User directory. Is there a way to copy selected folders in my user directory? My user directory is too large, and I'm really not interested in copying over some of the folders to my daily or weekly backups.

[dnanian]

Yes: drop me a note to the support email address and I'll provide you with some instructions (note, though, you'd need to purchase to use a custom script).

But: I really do encourage full backups. External drives are cheap, generally... sufficient space is pretty easy to come by.