I use Superduper to clone my hard drive about once per month and then let Time machine take care of it in between. Incidentally I use an application called Time Machine Editor to restrict Time Machine to one backup per day. However I am a light user and that suits me, other members may have other suggestions.
I consider the two products to be complimentary, I run Time machine via a Time Capsule throughout the day, so I can recover from screw ups ie accidental deletion of a key file.
I run Superduper each night, each drive gets cloned to another two drives and once a week or so to a third drive that is stored in the garden shed - hopefully far enough away from the house in the event of a fire so as to survive.
I use Superduper so that I can boot the system without delay if there is a drive failure and so get onto the Internet to order a replacement drive as well as keeping using the machine.
Remember Disk drives exist in one of two states
About to die
or
Dead
also data does not exist unless it is in at least two locations on different drives.
Thank you Lionel and Derek. I think my situation is more analogous to yours Lionel than to yours Derek, as I no longer earn a living from my computer. What I meant was what can Time Machine do that SuperDuper can't?
SuperDuper will produce a clone - a snapshot of your drive at one point in time. Time Machine allows you to look at the historical situation of your computer. You can boot a machine from a SuperDuper clone, you can't from time machine. If you've deleted a file and emptied the trash, Time Machine will let you step back in time to before you deleted it and recover it.
A SuperDuper clone is only as up-to-date as you make it, so if your clone is 3 months old and you need it, you'll have lost everything from the last three months. Time Machine is designed to work every hour (on files that have changed). So as long as your file was there more than an hour ago, it's recoverable - unless you decide to restrict its backups, by unplugging the drive or using special software.
I allow TM to back up as intended. If I alter ten files an hour for an eight hour day, then it backs up ten files every hour. If I only allow it to work once per day, it will back up eighty files.
Blimey Mick, you don't half work hard! Eighty files a day!!!!!
I know I must be wrong, because even the advertising for SuperDuper says it makes an ideal companion for Time Machine, but I thought you could tell SD to back up once an hour. If SD and ™ are both set to back up once an hour (not simultaneously) what would be the significant difference between the two?
Eric Jervis 