iBlog

SuperDuper! is, well, super duper!

As I mentioned last night, I purchased a 500GB external hard drive to back up my iMac. I picked up a Western Digital MyBook from Costco for $230. It includes both USB 2.0 and FireWire ports. The FireWire was important so that I can boot from the disk. MyBooks come formatted as FAT32 disks, which isn’t a problem for OS X to read, but you have to reformat as Mac OS Extended if you want to use SuperDuper! So I reformatted and also created two partitions so that I can use part of the disk as scratch space for video editing. Once that was done, I fired up SuperDuper!, and made a full backup of the iMac last night.

This morning I saw that the backup was successful, so I rebooted from the backup to make sure that was working. No problems there, so I should be able to recover from any future hard drive problems. Of course I imported some new pictures into iPhoto this morning, so the full backup is already out of date. This is why I will be registering SuperDuper! and will use the scheduling capabilities to make sure I am never more than a day or so away from a full backup.

And since the hard drive crash I have been archiving all pictures on another, smaller external hard drive. When I have enough to fill a DVD I will burn them to it as an additional safeguard. This was where my old backup scheme failed me. I was just about ready to burn another DVD when the hard drive crashed. Now I’ve got my pictures on several CDs and DVDs, the iMac’s drive, and most of them are also backed up on the MyBook.

Redundant? Yes, but I don’t want anymore sick feelings in the pit of my stomach…