An Ode to DiskWarrior, SuperDuper, and Dropbox
Three weeks ago the hard drive in my MacBook Pro went bad. So far as I can tell, I didn’t lose a single byte of data. Here’s how.
DiskWarrior and SuperDuper are indeed fantastic. Dropbox is in many ways very well done. Why can’t iDisk work like that? Still, I wish there were an option to operate Dropbox in non-haxie mode, where it didn’t load its code into the Finder. And I think that the company has been irresponsible with their users’ resource forks and metadata (and also with disclosing which parts of the files they sync). However, there is now a beta version that addresses these issues, so hopefully they’ll soon be a thing of the past.
Gruber potentially had a problem because his SuperDuper clone was over 10 days old, since he had been out of town. His solution: back up important files constantly to Dropbox. My solution: travel with a portable clone drive and back up important files to CrashPlan.
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I read Johns post and mailed him.
What is it with SuperDuper? Of all of shirt pocket stuff which is generally excellent, I found CCC far better. While SD struggled
http://www.shirt-pocket.com/blog/index.php/shadedgrey/comments/how_ya_doin/
CCC (http://www.bombich.com/)just worked and enabled me to my job (as it was then). I don't get the the ten day thing at all, software works when I want it to. I have never enabled Time machine.
Three back ups... external at home, external I carry, external (weekly at my brothers), bookmarks, docs, immediate stuff, memory sick and servers at work or around the planet. Synced by brain
If you simply click Cancel to the admin password prompts when Dropbox installs, it won't patch the Finder.
I'm still seeing some weirdness with Dropbox 0.8 - just duplicated and zero-size files, no data loss, but the former is an annoyance with EagleFiler because I don't even notice them unless they show up in a Growl notification.
SuperDuper is a godsend, but I can't get behind DropBox. I simply do not trust backing up my data to someone else's server and it is brutal on the network. I would suggest ChronoSync. I use this to sync data between my laptop and my desktop. Not only is everything in two places, but I have virtually the same environment regardless of where I'm working. You can even get this to function when you're working remotely. Seems like a no brainer to me.
Nicholas Riley: Interesting. Every time Dropbox launches it asks for the admin password. If I decline, it still installs the contextual menu plug-in (which loads code into the Finder) and prints a bunch of errors to the Console (seemingly about their file system watcher daemon). I don’t know that I’d want to trust an untested configuration.
I carry a portable clone drive, but mine has three interfaces on it FW800 FW400 and USB2. Firewire makes my clone drive a better bootable drive than a pure USB2.0. I use Chronosync to make this bootable clone, and to sync files across computers. Tried DropBox, good concept, but I do not want to trust my files to an operation on the internet. I don't trust their security, stability, or financial stability.
SuperDuper & CrashPlan are the core of my backup regiment too. I use SuperDuper to several large 3.5" hard drives which I rotate at the office, and an external notebook drive with USB 2.0 & FW800 for on the road. When I first migrated to OS X, I used CCC. At some point it gave me problems, and the then new SD worked. I haven't tried CCC in a long time, looks like bombich finally updated their web design from a OS 10.0 Beta.
For CrashPlan, I have a Mac Mini running as a local backup server and I use CrashPlan Central for out of region backups. I have used many different backup softwares in the last 20 years, but CrashPlan feels like the best ever. While I use their paid for version for home users for my own systems, I have also setup their enterprise offering CrashPlan Pro for several clients. Knowing that CrashPlan uses the same technology for Home as they do for Enterprise makes me feel comfortable about their reliability and staying power in the market place.
I think that DropBox is very slick, however, as a web developer we have already setup our own WebDav and SVN servers.
[...] in the forum (via John Gruber). Since the haxie is not strictly necessary, I think Dropbox should provide an option in the user interface to turn it [...]
