hi gary, I saw someone was having problems with time machine so you recomended super duper, I have been reading up on it and it says it can clone your hard drive,it also says you can make a larger hard drive on your computor, I dont want to do that, can I just connect a external hard drive(like I do in time machine) and when it finishes backing up disconect it and when I want to back up again connect it again? also can I view what is on the external drive when I connect it again like I do in time machine? thanks
In other words can I use it exactly like I use time machine? I connect and disconect with a western digital 500 gb
Viki
— Viki
You can use SuperDuper to do what you suggest: Connect an external drive, back up to it, and then disconnect it.
You can't view things on the drive like you do with Time Machine. It is just a normal hard drive that happens to have a copy of every file on it. You can browse through it yes, but using normal Finder windows, not a Time Machine-like interface.
Also note that this would not be an incremental backup. You would have a copy of every file, but just one copy, not various versions going back in time.
So no, you can't use it like Time Machine. Time Machine is better for general backup purposes because it is an incremental backup and it is easy to find and restore files. SuperDuper is great for a second backup, and other utility functions.
Sorry to come to this discussion so late, but I'm curious as to what is the difference between SuperDuper and Time Machine in terms of getting a Mac back up and running after a catastrophic hard drive failure?
I understand the difference between a snapshot of my drive at a place in time and the incremental nature of Time Machine, but I can use either to mirror to a new/replacement hard drive, right?
SuperDuper would make it very easy to completely restore the drive in one shot. Providing you just ran it before the trouble happened, of course.
With TM, you could do it too, but the chances are better that it just ran and has a more complete backup.
Thank you Gary.
Hi, I had my old macbook hard drive extracted to an external, now I bought a new mac mini...I only want to extract the iTunes library and documents from that image (a "sparseimage" file)...can it be done and how? Thanks.
Just mount the sparse image as a disk image. The copy the files you want.