A SuperDuper Back Up Strategy

[edoates]

The only issue with this, from my own recent, painful experience, is that there are drive failures which will let SuperDuper run long enough to basically corrupt your backup leaving the message that the backup is in an unknown state.

My machine was using a strategy similar to the one noted above. My internal hard drive failed so that OS X (10.4.6, btw) would run, but there were lurking bad blocks. Finally, one was in a bad enough spot that SD failed (red alter on the status screen), and my backup sparse image would not mount properly; on reboot, the system would no longer boot (it had been up for a few weeks without rebooting, and even permission repair worked).

The solution is the noted more complex procedure (basically, treat the hard drive failure like a fire); or, depending on the size of the drive to be backed up, use multiple sparse images, smart backup, and a weekly (or so) cycle between the backups. A weekly verification that the last backup is good before cycling it would be needed, too.

Ed

PS: I was able to recover my data with Data Rescue II (neither DiskWarrior nor TechTool Pro 4 could help at all; DW spun forever trying to build a directory, TT4 crashed!).