Backing up your computer is something that you should do to protect your data. After all, once you lose it it’s gone forever. On my Mac I use SuperDuper by a small company named Shirt Pocket Software to backup my Mac. The software is very simple to use and creates Apple disk images that are bootable. Why is that important? That means it’s an exact copy of your Mac that makes recovery from a disaster a snap. That’s something that you don’t appreciate until you actually need to recover from a disaster. It’s also one thing that SuperDuper has over Apple’s Time Machine backup software which won’t create a bootable image and require you to hop through a ton of hoops to get back to where you need to be in the event of a disaster.
Another handy feature is Smart Update. In short, SuperDuper is smart enough to only update the things that it needs to update which means that it doesn’t take all that long to back up your Mac. Nice!. Plus you can automate all of this so that you don’t even have to think about it. In my case, I have it set to back up my Mac two separate disk images rotating between them every week using Smart Update starting at 2AM every morning. That way I can go back a week to find something if I have to. That only took minutes to set up.
Gripes? Only one. Every since I updated to Lion (and Mountain Lion since), I’ve had this intermittent problem where I look at my Mac in the morning and there’s a request for a username and password for my D-Link DNS-323 NAS box. I can’t type in either the username or password box and I have to click cancel. The dialog box with the username and password box pops up again. I can then enter the username and password that my NAS box expects and then SuperDuper works as designed. I think that this relates to a bug that was mentioned on the Shirt Pocket blog that apparently is being worked on. But I’m not sure. Some aspects of this bug doesn’t quite fit. We’ll see when Shirt Pocket releases an update.
Ignoring that, if you want a backup program that is simple to use and gives you an bootable back up that is easy to restore. Take a good look at SuperDuper. I’m pretty sure it will be exactly what you’re looking for in a backup program. It’s free to download and use, but if you want to use the more advanced features such as scheduling backups, it’s $27.95 USD. That’s a small price to pay for data security.