SuperDuper, Carbon Copy Cloner and Others

SuperDuper, Carbon Copy Cloner and Others

Byrichard

In 2007 I bought a copy of SuperDuper that I used to backup my laptops for a while. I bought the licence for fourteen GBP in 2007 and it is still valid to this day. That’s less than a GBP per year of use. The tool is simple. It allows you to backup your mac’s system disk or other drives and make them bootable when relevant. This means that you can run your laptop or desktop either from your local drive or an external drive.

Superduper

If the internal drive fails you can switch to the backup drive within seconds. Just hold option at boot, select the backup drive, and boot into your external hard drive. Continue working. The same licence now costs 27 CHF but since this is a lifetime licence it’s worth having.

Carbon Copy Cloner

I heard about Carbon Copy Cloner regularly through various podcasts, and work, so I decided to play with that backup solution but it requires you to pay for an upgrade every few years. It’s 50 CHF now, to buy for the current version, and half off for the next version. I stopped using Carbon Copy Cloner around 2017 or so because MacOS changed to APFS and broke backup solutions. At this point we had to switch back to slow and clunky Time Machine.

The issue with apps today is that they’re built on the ‘pay yearly’ and ‘pay monthly’ model, which both makes sense, and makes no sense. It makes sense that in the age of incremental upgrades we would pay constantly to have apps updated but at the same time this constant paying for apps becomes expensive.

Apps are Expensive

For a long time I would download a dozen or more apps per week from the iOS app, to play with, and enjoy. Over time every single app began to cost 27 CHF per year or more. At this point a dozen apps at 27 CHF per year comes to 324 CHF per year. This is too expensive. It’s good for Apple but awful for users. The worst thing about paying per year is that the companies that are charging are not even making enough to survive, so we’re paying for nothing. Apple benefits but we, and developers, just pay through the nose, just to exist.

And Finally

I am grateful to Shirt Pocket, the company behind SuperDuper for updating the app and allowing us to use it for over a decade without having to pay a yearly upgrade fee. Paradoxically they thanked me too, in their aknowledgements too. If you’re looking for an affordable bootable system disk backup solution then I would still recommend them today.

Experiments With Time Machine

Byrichard

Recently I was using a one terabyte drive to backup a half terabyte drive and it would take four and a half hours to backup and I think I may have figured out why the software was taking so long. It’s because it was never designed to be used as I am using it.


Time Machine is designed to work with a hard drive that is smaller or as big as the system it’s backing up. When you get a one terabyte disk to backup a half terabyte hard drive it has the opportunity to save many more files than are on the system and this is fine initially but over time the number of files that it has to check gets larger and larger until finally it takes hours, rather than minutes to backup.


We need a new feature in Time Machine so that it becomes archival software, rather than backup and version software. It should keep at least two log files. The first log file should be of all the changes on an hourly, weekly and monthly basis on both the system drive and the backup drive.


The purpose of these log files would be to be a quick place for Time Machine or other backup software to see what has changed between the most recent backup and the current file situation.


It should check what files have been changed since the last backup and sync those, but not bother with older files unless the directory says that something has been deleted. This feature could be added to spotlight as it is already indexing all the files.


The purpose would be to check one or two master log files, synchronise and then complete the task within minutes, whether the backup software has been run minutes or weeks ago.


For now I think that time machine checks every single file on the system, and then every file of every backup for however many months you have been backing up. In theory this comes to millions of files, so millions of checks.


The data that Time Machine had to backup was regularly ten or twenty gigabytes but it was taking four hours per backup, which is far too long, for something that is meant to take minutes. It would take that long on a daily basis.


In related news my 2007 licence for Superduper is still valid today, so I can use that to backup, now that my experimentation is coming to a close. With Superduper it keeps a current clone of the system disk so that if and when a drive fails you can switch to the backup drive within 30 seconds of a drive failure.


Now that I know what the issue is, I can act accordingly.