MACINTOSH BACKUPS JUST BECAME EASIER
Believe it or not, there still are Macintosh users out there using the officially dead Mac OS 9 operating system. Ok, so maybe I shouldn't be so incredulous about that. After all, there are people out there still using Windows 98 and Windows ME too. Now I recognize the fact that some legacy applications exist that you must have which just won't work using the latest OS. Or the computer does exactly what it needs to do so why bother with a costly hardware upgrade or new machine to run the newer operating system? I'll give you those. And by the way, Mac OS 9 is "officially" dead because Apple hasn't made a Macintosh that will start up in OS 9 for some time now. In fact, the only way you can run OS 9 on any newer machine is in the OS X "Classic" mode. But until recently there was one ability I sorely missed with Mac OS 9 and that was the ease of making a backup.
To make a partial or total backup in Mac OS 9, all you had to do was simply drag any file, folder or disk image onto the image of another disk. The latter would copy the System folder that contained everything it needed to make a bootable backup of the entire drive. That all changed with OS X. Yes OS X is rock solid, it has so many new features that we've lost count of them, and you can backup individual files and folders. But you can't use OS X to make a total hard disk backup.
Until recently there existed only a couple of backup utilities that could do the job but they either offered too many features or required you to acquire other software components to make them work. In addition the latter, which is a shareware utility, requires you to have a fairly good foundation or some solid insights into how OS X works. It contains options that would make any geek's propeller twirl. But fortunately, there is an OS X total backup product that simply lets you get on with the job of making a total, bootable backup of any OS X drive without knowing anything except the drive you want to backup and to what drive you want the backup made.
Shirt Pocket (www.shirt-pocket.com), the makers of SuperDuper! defines the program as a "Heroic System Recovery For Mere Mortals" and given the complexity of OS X with all of its hidden files and components, I'd say that's an accurate description. When you first run SuperDuper!, you see a window asking you what disk you want to copy and what disk you want to copy it to. It explains everything in simple, concise English without any techno-babble. If you have the space available, it will literally "clone" any disk from one location to another. After making an initial total copy of your hard disk drive that can contain OS X, OS 9, applications and data files, you can feel safe in that if anything happens to your original drive, you can restore it to it's identical condition up to the moment you created the backup.
With a few more clicks, you can easily create checkpoints or incremental backups that will preserve everything up to that moment. Making a "Smart Update" causes SuperDuper! to examine every bit of data on your hard drive and only backup what has changed between now and the last time you made a backup. So Smart Updates only take a fraction of the time it takes to make an initial clone of your hard drive. According to the company's founder and programmer David Nanian, SuperDuper! has been designed to copy everything and insure that the copy is identical to the original. If the original drive is a bootable, working implementation of OS X, so will the copy of it that SuperDuper! creates. And it does all of this without the user needing to know nothing more than how to basically run OS X.
I've always maintained that it's not "if" your hard drive will fail but rather "when" it will fail. Sooner or later, your hard drive will malfunction and heaven help you if you didn't make a backup. It's a hard lesson to learn. But with SuperDuper! in place, you can now make OS X volume backups easily and quickly. This is one utility application that every Macintosh owner should have in their possession.
SuperDuper! sells for $19.95. The initial download is free and that trial version limits you to only making cones. Purchasing SuperDuper! unlocks all of its other abilities such as the Smart Update feature.
www.shirt-pocket.com |
