To protect against inevitable drive failure, I clone my PowerBook’s startup disk to two firewire drives, one at work and one at home. Up until recently, that involved OS X’s Disk Utility and “restore”ing the startup disk to the firewire drive. That process was klunky and took about two hours (my external disks are slow). At work, letting my PowerBook sit still for two hours is fine, but at home it’s less acceptable. When at home my PowerBook is very mobile and is rarely in the same room as the external drives. Not having my machine next to the drives meant I would often let my clone at home go weeks out of date. This was a problem, but one that I wasn’t too worried about. Then I started to see some hype about SuperDuper! 2.0 (SD) and decided to give it a try. The trial version I had would clone for me, but it wouldn’t let me try the “smart update”. Smart update is described by the following:

Smart update will copy and erase what’s needed to make PowerCooke Mirror identical to your selections from Macintosh HD. The result will mimic “Erase, then copy”, but will typically take a fraction of the time.

This was intriguing. I decided to shell out the $27.95 without even getting to test this “Smart Update”, call it a hunch. Turns out I made the right choice.

I have about 50GB of disk space used on my PowerBook. The initial clone using SD took the expected 2 hours. Two days after that I went to update my external drive using the smart update and yowza, was it fast. The end result was an updated clone in 15 minutes. That’s priceless. Now, almost every morning before I hop in the shower I plug in my drive and let SD do it’s thing. Almost always, by the time I’m done, so is SD.

Another high point of SD is its feedback during the copy. SD gives a nice “Elapsed time” in the lower right of the window and while it’s copying, you see an “Effective copy speed” in MB/s plus some other little goodies.

There are some quirks, but no show stoppers yet. The biggest quirk is that when you start SD, it looks for the drive you last copied to, if it can’t find the drive you get a scolding saying that it can’t be found. Since I copy to a drive at work and a drive at home, I see that dialog almost every time I start SD.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 12th, 2006 at 2:36 am and is filed under 3rd Party Apps, Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.