SuperDuper! 10.5 Support

/ 19 October 2007

I just looked online in the Shirt Pocket SuperDuper! Forums. The current release of SuperDuper! is not compatible with 10.5. An older build was, but important key structures of 10.5 have changed, and the developers haven’t yet gotten the chance to test SuperDuper! with the OS. At first glance this isn’t an issue because Time Machine will take over the task of backing up for most of us (likely myself included), but it’s still good to know that (regardless if we use it or not) SuperDuper! won’t yet be compatible with 10.5. Again, it’s my full intention to transition over to using Time Machine because the restore functionalities are, well, there for single items. Plus, it’s part of the OS, so I naturally trust it a bit more than I trust SuperDuper!.

I’ve read the online information at Apple’s website about Time Machine a lot more carefully and have begun to trust what it does more than I did when I first read about it. Let me explain that to you here (as I understand it). When you first select a disk (or partition) to be a Time Machine backup device Time Machine copies the contents of your entire boot drive to the device (ignoring caches and other unimportant files). It puts that backup into an organized filesystem on the device by the folder structure: Time Machine-> {Your computer’s share name}-> {one folder per backup}. The first backup has your full disk, but each of the others have just what has changed (so in my case the first will be 50 GB, but the rest will be just like 1.5 GB). When the disk gets full Time Machine alerts you that it will start to delete older backups to make room for the new (and thus more important) backups. It will then transfer all needed system files to the newer backups so that full restoration abilities remain, while the oldest content gets deleted. In this manner, we’ll probably never notice when older backups get removed, the most important ones anyway are the newest 2 or 3.

Also, Time Machine is smart enough to remember where it left off if you interrupted a backup (by unplugging the disk or putting your mac to sleep) and adds that to the que for the next chance it gets to backup.

Overall, it seems that Time Machine will be a better backup choice for all of us, even those that are in the rhythm of using SuperDuper! (or the like) to keep backups of our macs (so we won’t have to worry if the software stops functioning). I certainly know that I’ll test Time Machine out with a second drive (so as to keep my Tiger backup longer) and probably turn the drive into my permanent backup drive. Enjoy, Alex.

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