SuperDuper is Leopard compatible

My favorite backup app in the entire world... no wait... the entire universe is now Leopard compatible. You would think that between family (especially with twins babies- Charlotte (L) and David) and work and church and ASMP other commitments I wouldn't have time to obsess over a backup program... but I make time for the important things ;-)

SuperDuper is now Leopard compatible. If you don't use it... buy it now and start using it. It is the best bootable backup solution for the Mac.

Great Insight for the Impatient (Me!)

I am by nature fairly impatient. I am not prone to sitting around or waiting for things to happen. I like to move quickly and I sometimes forget that there are good reasons that the entire world does not move at the speed that I would like it to move at.

A great example of this is the blog of Dave Nanian, the maker of SuperDuper my very favorite Mac backup program. SuperDuper is still not Leopard compatible.

Now I have been using Leopard for a couple of months and was starting to become impatient with how long it was taking for SuperDuper to be updated. I love SuperDuper and was really growing tired of waiting for it to get bumped up to being Leopard compatible . I mean it is just a backup app, how long could it really take? (Forgive me for thinking this!!)

Well if you take a look at Dave's blog of his and his team's progress, it is taking a while... and for good reason. Really, read his blog, it helped me take a big super-sized dose of patience.

Sometimes I forget that behind the smooth interface and reliable performance of my favorite apps, there are people hard at work trying to make them better. And after reading Dave's progress with SuperDuper and Leopard, it details all the work they have done in fixing some major hiccups due to the new OS, apparently many of which were Time Machine based.

I appreciate companies like ShirtPocket Software (Dave and the other creators of SuperDuper) who take the time to make everything work right together... Time Machine and SuperDuper so that when I install it and use it, it will work great and not mess up the other software on my Mac...

Even when it doesn't happen on MY schedule.

Take your time Dave, I can wait.

Mac Backup on the Road

One of the most vulnerable times for a photographer to suffer computer issues or data loss is on the road. This is also where photographers are rarely backed up.

We are creatures of habit. Get on location, setup, shoot, drop images into the laptop, edit, get the selects to the client, break everything down, job well done.

But once in a while the unexpected happens. Just like we plan for hardware failure with backup cameras, and extra flash and more than one memory card and camera battery, your laptop has the ability to fail, too. The most likely part of your laptop to fail unexpectedly is the hard drive. So backing it up is important... and if you are a Mac user, relatively simple.

The first thing to look at is how much junk you have on your laptop. I am a firm believer in keeping a laptop slim with only the things you need to get the job done. I don’t save a lot of photos, games, or a library of every QuickTime movie I’ve ever downloaded on the laptop... I waste the hard drive space on my desktop computer for things like that!

As soon as I get back to my office from a shoot, I move the photos off my laptop and onto my desktop system which then gets it started in my archiving system so I know it is backed up and protected.

By limiting what I keep on the laptop, it also makes it easier to back it up. My backup solution is simple. I have an external portable firewire hard drive... portable drives are the ones that run off the firewire cable and require no A/C Power. The MacBook and MacBook Pro will also boot off of a USB2 drive... but running a machine off of a USB drive is a slow and frustrating experience... stick with firewire.

It is also true that portable hard drives are more expensive and offer less storage than the desktop variety hard drive, but remember, you are buying this to use with a laptop. Portable drives are powered off the firewire connection to the computer and they are much smaller, meaning you don't need to fire somewhere to plug it in and it will fit in your laptop bag. You can be thrifty and buy a full sized hard drive, but you are not going to enjoy dragging it around in your bag and always be searching for a plug when you need to use it.

I normally use SuperDuper to make the backup of the hard drive. SuperDuper creates a perfect bootable clone of my hard drive and also allows you to do synchronized backups after the first full backup. (This means that instead of it backing up the entire drive every time you back up, you have the option to only update the things that have changed since the last backup... saving boatloads of time.)

*Note - SuperDuper is now 10.5 compatible.

If you are using an Intel based Mac, there are ways you can back up your Windows partition, too... but that's a topic for another time.

Regardless of which software you use to create your backup, make sure that you select the option to make a bootable backup. That way, if you need to boot from the external drive, you power down your Mac, plug it in, hold down the “Option” button while booting up, select the external drive, and you are back in business.

The other reason having a bootable backup is to repair your main hard drive if it starts acting weird when you are on the road. You can boot up from the external and run the disk utility or other fixit programs on the main drive and hopefully be able to repair it. If you can't, no big deal, just clone your backup back over to your main drive and you are back with a working OS again.

Assuming that you keep your laptop slimmed down without a bunch of extra unnecessary stuff, you should only need to update the backup every month or so to account for software upgrades.

Another thing that I would suggest is create two partitions on the external drive so you can use the extra partition as an alternate storage location for images. If you use a program like PhotoMechanic, you can set it to import the images to a folder on your main hard drive and to copy them to the second partition on the external drive at the same time. That way you have an immediate backup of the files.

If I am shooting out of town, I usually store my external drive separately from my laptop after I've loaded my shoot in it so that if my laptop bag gets stolen, at least I have all my images backed up safely somewhere else (like in my camera bag.) If you keep the external drive with your laptop and it disappears or gets run over by a bus or something... you are hosed.

So remember to backup your laptop and have fun if you make it to MacWorld... I'm home hanging out with the twins.

I am liking Leopard

I am now running Leopard on all three of my work Macs. Currently, that would be a Mac Pro 2.66 quadcore, a 17" MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo 2.33, and a black MacBook Core 2 Duo 2ghz. It has been quite stable and I am not experiencing any real serious issues with it.

My main pet peeves are that I can't get my HP Officejet 7310 duplexing printer to duplex any more and that I have a few little odd files in the trash that won't go away on the Mac Pro (but this problem hasn't shown up on either laptop.)

I understand that there is actually a fix for the files in the trash thing that has something to do with the windows partition... maybe (I am running Boot Camp, but I haven't taken the time to research it since the only thing that happens is that it shows that the trash is perpetually not empty. The things like holding down "Option" while emptying the trash or using SuperGetInfo to make the files go away hasn't worked. If you do a get info on them, try to rename them, or try to drag them to the desktop, they just disappear... and then magically re-appear in the trash again. (I'm writing an awful lot about a problem I haven't really tried to fix, huh?)

Another thing that I am really, really, missing is the ability to use Shirt Pocket Sofware's SuperDuper to back up my laptops. It has been my nearly perfect tool for backing up the MacBook and MacBook Pro to external portable firewire drives so that I have a bootable backup ready to go if something goes amiss in the field while on a shoot. The thing I love about SuperDuper is that it is simple and after you do the initial backup, you have the option to do smart backups so that it is only updating what has changed since the last time you backed up... it doesn't copy everything all over again. It will also make the copy bootable so that you can plug it in and boot from the external drive if necessary (it does need to be a firewire drive for this feature.) They are furiously working on a Leopard (10.5) compatible version and neither I nor my Macs can wait!

What I am liking about Leopard is that it is fast, has some cool new tweaks, and is no less reliable than Tiger (10.4).

What I'm really digging right now is Time Machine. Under Tiger, I used Apple's Backup program (which is free if you have a .Mac account - another good idea... but we'll get to that another time.) for daily archival backups to an external drive and then would do a full bootable backup of the system using SuperDuper every few weeks.

On my desktop system, I care more about my data (address books, photos, invoicing, receipts, passwords) being backed up than keeping the machine instantly re-bootable if there is a hard drive or software issue. After all, if I am sitting in the office, I have both laptops and all the install CD's to re-install everything anyways. So I can always pull the backup off the external and run things off a laptop if I need to. But Backup was always slow and I would set it to run at 2:30am so that it wouldn't choke whatever else I was doing... plus there were occasionally issues with programs like Mail if you were using them when Backup started running where the backup could fail when you went to recover it.

I have found that Time Machine is fast and seems to use disk space very efficiently (in the time I have been using it.) I have recovered files from it and found that it recovered thing much more quickly than Backup ever did. Part of this could also be attributed to the fact that I don't have weeks and weeks of backups stacked on the drive yet. I would imagine that the performance could decline some over time as there are more backups it will have to sort through to pull out the right data. From my experiments, it doesn't seem to matter to Time Machine. It seems to make good backups of things even while you are using them, or at least must have the sense to avoid backing up the things that could cause problems down the road.

More about Leopard later...