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For years we have been using SuperDuper to create bootable clone backups of all of our Macs. Each Mac has its own external hard drive reserved for backups, and in the event of a massive failure we can be back up and running quickly. The author of SuperDuper is hard at work on a Leopard compatible version, but I did backup each of my Macs under Tiger before doing any upgrades.
As I have been working on this blog entry I’ve been doing my first Time Machine backup on my Mac Pro. It does use a fair amount of CPU, but with 8 cores to play with, no worries.
The new Time Machine feature in Leopard has a different intended use. While SuperDuper does a fantastic job of creating a bootable emergency recovery system, Time Machine is intended to give you a way of falling back to earlier versions of a document, or recovering files deleted unintentionally. I’m using both methods right now. I bought a 
Fantom G-Force MegaDisk Triple Interface
Time Machine is designed for use with an external hard drive, so it is best suited for use with desktop Macs, but you certainly could devote an external drive to a Macbook or Macbook Pro and simply connect it when you are at home or the office, wherever the external drive is kept.
The real advantage of Time Machine is its informal version control capability. With the source for over 70 websites, and over 30,000 digital photos on my system, I have lots and lots of files that change frequently. While this web server always has the most current version of my web content there are times when I wish to refer to an older version. Time Machine checks your entire hard drive once every hour and backs up every file that has changed in that hour. Files from previous days are preserved for a month, and files from previous weeks are preserved until the backup drive becomes full. 
Once SuperDuper has been updated to work with Leopard, I will certainly still make periodic bootable backups of my system in order to be able to get back up and running ASAP. I’ve also learned in the past the hard lesson that it is best not to rely completely on just one backup strategy.
Technorati Tags: Leopard, Time Machine, SuperDuper, backup strategy, Apple Mac, Mac Pro, G-Force Megadisk, external hard drives, OS X, new features, CPU utilization
Ron on November 9th, 2007 at 5:27 am says:
I would rather question the working of time machine. If Apple had security a little bit higher on their priority list, Time machine would have worked at the very least with FileVault. Sure you can back up the filevault when you are logged out, but as it sees your encrypted disk as one file, it is pretty useless. I am sure apple will spin it in a way that Time machine is intended for consumers who do not need to encrypt their harddisk, but that is frankly bullocks. Nobody should run around with an unencrypted disk, we all know how easy it is to steal valuable personal details at the very least, let alone work that is stored on your disk. Therefore I see Time Machine as no more than a promotional tactic to lure windows users who do not often encrypt their harddisk, for the rest of us it is a bad leopard..
Atheist.nu » Do you have a backup strategy on February 8th, 2008 at 3:11 pm says:
[...] If you have a Mac, and have Leopard, you can use Time Machine(Apple’s free backup utility), but SuperDuper does offer more features, and their support is fantastic. Here is an article on why you may want to use both. [...]
Maculous » Toast Upgrade Toasts Toast on April 12th, 2009 at 6:56 pm says:
[...] for me I am fanatical about backups, I just used Time Machine to restore from a yesterday backup and the world was once again a good and happy place. I’ve [...]