Advice on other backup packages

[jrls]

I currently use SD! to do maintain a father/grandfather backup plan using multiple FW drives and partitions.

I would like to also, periodically, backup my data to optical media. This would require backups spanning multiple media. SD! does not support this feature. Although I would like this feature added to SD!, I do not expect it. However, is there a backup program that will build spanning backups that preserves all the metadata in the original and allows complete resores.

Thanks.

[dnanian]

I believe both Retrospect and Apple's Backup will do this. Whether it "preserves all the metadata", though, I can't say...

[jrls]

Restrospect got on my black list. I was a very long time user of DiskFit, which was dreopped in the transition to Mac OS X. I found Retrospect to be very slow and got very fed up with that program. In one of their releases, they introduced a bug that generated tones of incorrect error messages for my backups. They did not fix this bug in the next 2 releases. I am very uncomfortable with a backup program with bugs that are not addressed.

[nekomatic]

I want to do the same thing as you - archive full (or partial) backups on multiple optical discs. It looks as though DropDMG http://c-command.com/dropdmg/ would fit the bill pretty well. I haven't tried it myself yet, though I intend to.

Alternatively if you're happy writing a shellscript it looks like you can access much of the same functionality using hdiutil: http://developer.apple.com/documenta...hdiutil.1.html

Since you have SuperDuper you would probably still want to use that to create your backup as a disk image, then use DropDMG or hdiutil to segment and burn it.

[jrls]

Originally Posted by nekomatic

I want to do the same thing as you - archive full (or partial) backups on multiple optical discs. It looks as though DropDMG http://c-command.com/dropdmg/ would fit the bill pretty well. I haven't tried it myself yet, though I intend to.

Thank you. One other possibility I have located is Toast. It seems to support multi image backups also. I amy pursue both as well as trying to investigate he handling of metadata by those programs.

[nekomatic]

I asked about metadata on the DropDMG support forum and the author replied that everything is preserved if you use DropDMG to convert an existing image file, or if you use it to image a mounted read-only volume:

http://c-command.com/forums/showthread.php?t=324