31 Days, 31 Products: SuperDuper!

Day 24: SuperDuper!

This post is part of a larger series where for 31 days I’m posting a story about a particular product or service I’ve come to enjoy.

This is a timely recommendation as just yesterday I had a bit of a scare where my external 2TB (platter-based) media drive decided not to mount. Happy to say the drive did wake up eventually but I wasn’t too concerned since I has a fairly recent backup I made with SuperDuper.

SuperDuper is a cloning tool that can help you clone a hard drive to another drive or DMG file. The drive based clones are fully bootable and can help you out when your main drive bites the dust. SuperDuper can do full or incremental backups, and these can also be scheduled to run overnight.

My current home setup includes an 2011 iMac with 2 internal hard drives. A 256 SSD acts as the main system HD and a 2 TB platter-based drive is cut up for various purposes (1 partition is a Bootcamp drive, 1 is a mirror backup of the SSD and the other is a time machine backup of the SSD). I then have a separate 2 TB external media HD which has my iTunes library and general archive (the largest files consisting of old video projects).

I use SuperDuper on a scheduled backup to clone my main system hard drive and then I use a OmniFocus monthly todo remind me to plug in another 2 TB drive to mirror my main media archive. The incremental backup works get here making the task really quick and easy to do.

SuperDuper has save my ass many times and I highly recommend it as a valuable tool to help you migrate data around and help facilitate your backup strategy.

A free download of SuperDuper is available but if you want to unlock the incremental, scheduling and scripting features you’ll need to purchase a license. A license costs $28 and can be purchased from the Shirt Pocket store.