Backup Reunion Plan

[Jeff89]

I've had my new Mac for just about a year (my old one was running Tiger and I had to buy a new one because it was a PowerPC Mac) but I had not used any backup software, which is rather foolish, I know. On my old Mac, I used SuperDuper!, which I liked very much. The new Mac, of course, has Time Machine. I tried it out and didn't like it - those hourly backups are really annoying and a third-party program I downloaded to change the intervals didn't work very well. I also read that backing up Reunion while it is open is not a good idea, so I came up with a new plan. I went back to using SuperDuper! and have set it to run every day at 6:00 p.m. I made an entry in the Reminder app, which is built into Mountain Lion, to send me a reminder at 5:45 p.m. to shut down Reunion. That gives me enough time to shut down all of my open apps before SuperDuper starts up at 6:00 p.m.

I have a 500Gb external Mercury Elite Pro drive from Other World Computing, attached to the USB port. You can partition it with Disk Utility, if you are so inclined. SuperDuper! makes a bootable backup and the first run takes about 15 minutes. A bootable backup is really handy if your drive crashes. After the first run, if you select "Smart Backup", the backup process only takes a few minutes.

I did a search on the forum for "Backups" and found other solutions, but not one involving SuperDuper! and the Reminder app. If you don't have a backup strategy, you need to come up with one. Take a look at SuperDuper! (I'm just a satisfied user) - it only costs $27.95 and that is for a lifetime license.

Jeff

[donworth]

Re: Backup Reunion Plan

Good ideas, Jeff!

I use Time Machine myself (with a Mercury Elite Pro 2TB drive) but I only plug the external drive in when I want to do a backup every few days or right after I have done a lot of updates in Reunion or a lot of photo scanning. I'm not too worried about losing a couple days work most of the time, and I also hate the hourly(?) backups TM does if I let it have constant access to its drive.

I also do a full backup to another (portable) disk every six months and drop it off with my sister-in-law who lives 100 miles away. And I've been burning my genealogy files and photos to DVDs and mailing them to distant (in more ways than one) cousins all over the US, Australia, Sweden, etc. There can never been too many off-site backups of the stuff you REALLY care about!

By the way, I also have a Windows 7 Bootcamp partition and I LOVE using Winclone to back that up! I also don't like being dependent on proprietary databases (like iPhoto's) so I export all my photos for long-term backup occasionally too.

Don

[Michael Talibard]

Re: Backup Reunion Plan

Well, it takes all sorts to make a world. I am a great admirer of Time Machine, and at a loss to imagine what could be annoying about the hourly backups

[DelbertCurlin]

Re: Backup Reunion Plan

Well, it takes all sorts to make a world.

I have OS 10.9 installed on my 13" Macbook pro.

I purchased a drive and installed Time Machine but don't understand how it works.

I have another 15" macbook pro which works but can't be upgraded because some part of the installed system seems to be missing. Don't know where or how. Can I use the TM backup some way to restore to this 15" Macbook pro? Then I would have reunion and a complete system if so as an extra redundancy.

[Bob White]

Re: Backup Reunion Plan

......... those hourly backups are really annoying and a third-party program I downloaded to change the intervals didn't work very well.......

I have used TimeMachineEditor for several years and not had one iota of problem. I don't like hourly backups for the simple reason that such frequency is totally unnecessary for personal usage on one computer. I set it for six hours several years ago and never had to touch it except to update to a new version a couple times. See it at http://timesoftware.free.fr/timemachineeditor/.

[Jeff89]

Re: Backup Reunion Plan

[QUOTE=Michael Talibard;39703]Well, it takes all sorts to make a world. I am a great admirer of Time Machine, and at a loss to imagine what could be annoying about the hourly backups

[Jeff89]

Re: Backup Reunion Plan

I have used TimeMachineEditor for several years and not had one iota of problem. I don't like hourly backups for the simple reason that such frequency is totally unnecessary for personal usage on one computer. I set it for six hours several years ago and never had to touch it except to update to a new version a couple times. See it at http://timesoftware.free.fr/timemachineeditor/.

That is the program that quit working after a day. I couldn't do anything to TM and I was so irritated with TM by then that I trashed Time Machine Editor (rather than downloading another copy) and switched to SuperDuper! Then, I found out that I couldn't get rid of TM. I'm not a happy camper.

Jeff

[Dennis J. Cunniff]

Re: Backup Reunion Plan

now that I've switched to SuperDuper! and turned TM off, it refuses to go away. I get daily warning messages, no matter what I do to TM to tell it to stop.

Nothing you do in Time Machine will help, what you need to do is stop SuperDuper.

When you run SuperDuper, it turns TimeMachine on and runs it at the interval you've set. So turning off Time Machine isn't doing anything; under SuperDuper Time Machine is normally off.

To stop this process, stop SuperDuper.

[theKiwi]

Re: Backup Reunion Plan

Nothing you do in Time Machine will help, what you need to do is stop SuperDuper.

When you run SuperDuper, it turns TimeMachine on and runs it at the interval you've set. So turning off Time Machine isn't doing anything; under SuperDuper Time Machine is normally off.

To stop this process, stop SuperDuper.

??????????

SuperDuper is nothing to do with TimeMachine - at all!!

Roger

[Jeff89]

Re: Backup Reunion Plan

Nothing you do in Time Machine will help, what you need to do is stop SuperDuper.

When you run SuperDuper, it turns TimeMachine on and runs it at the interval you've set. So turning off Time Machine isn't doing anything; under SuperDuper Time Machine is normally off.

To stop this process, stop SuperDuper.

SuperDuper! doesn't turn Time Machine on, to the best of my knowledge. The error message I get comes every 6 hours, the interval I set with Time Machine Editor before that program quit working. The message arrives 3 hours after SuperDuper! finishes its backup. I don't think it has anything to do with SuperDuper! - it's a TM and Apple issue.

Thanks,

Jeff

[Michael Talibard]

Re: Backup Reunion Plan

… My first objection is that it is generally not a good idea to have any software applications running when making a backup. Here is what Leister has to say about that matter:

http://www.leisterpro.com/doc/version9/questions/answers/timemachine.php

Thanks for this valuable reminder. What Leister are saying here matches my experience. The simple golden rule is to quit Reunion before you restore. That rule being observed, TM's hourly back-ups seem to do no harm at all, and are so useful in all sorts of other contexts.

By the way, I quite agree that you should be able to remove what you don't want, and that Apple is far too paternal.

[Jeff89]

Re: Backup Reunion Plan

Thanks for this valuable reminder. What Leister are saying here matches my experience. The simple golden rule is to quit Reunion before you restore. That rule being observed, TM's hourly back-ups seem to do no harm at all, and are so useful in all sorts of other contexts.

By the way, I quite agree that you should be able to remove what you don't want, and that Apple is far too paternal.

I found that the interruption to my work of having to remember, every 55 minutes, to shut down Reunion so that Time Machine could do a backup without causing problems with Reunion, was too much to deal with. I can remember every day at 6:00 p.m. (helped by Reminder), but every hour?

One thing that SuperDuper! does that Time Machine does not is that it creates a bootable copy. That is invaluable in the case of a hard disk crash. You can then boot from your external hard drive while you get your problem fixed. That isn't possible with Time Machine.

Jeff

[HJKeats]

Re: Backup Reunion Plan

I

[rclrocco]

Re: Backup Reunion Plan

HJK. Yes that is useful, but I'm stuck on the first line, where it says,

"Using the command line and defaults write, ......."

Can you perhaps explain what that is please

[HJKeats]

Re: Backup Reunion Plan

Hi Rupert,

"Defaults write" is a command line statement that writes instructions to the Mac OS. I would suggest it is not for the faint-of-heart if you are uncomfortable using line commands from the terminal screen. These are other line commands using default writes from the same website entitled 10 of the Best Defaults Write Commands to Improve Mac OS X.