plasticsfuture

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• 1. coelomic  |  April 24th, 2006 at 07:37

  When I bought SD! a while back, one of the reasons was that it was one of the cheapest utilities around. I am now very happy that my decision was the right one. Another point to note is that the support that comes with SD! in terms of forums, members and support from the author is just unparalleled. This blog and its content is fantastic. Thanks for this writeup.

• 2. Bloody Fingers » Bl&hellip  |  April 24th, 2006 at 08:51

  […] A very exhaustive comparison of backup software for Mac, with an emphasis on the preservation of OS X metadata. The clear winner is apparently SuperDuper. […]

• 3. ebaranz  |  April 24th, 2006 at 14:13

  Very interesting test and results. I miss only a couple of indicators: (a) which tools are case-sensitive aware? (b) which tools are generating images (if any) whose content is case-sensitive? Of course, I am using HFS+ journaled, case-sensitive filesystems (under Tiger 10.4.6).

• 4. Gueorgui  |  April 24th, 2006 at 19:18

  How about Personal Backup X4? That works pretty well for most of the criteria you listed.

• 5. maurits  |  April 24th, 2006 at 19:25

  Gueorgui: Thanks for the pointer. What does “pretty well” mean? have you actually tested it? They don’t seem to offer an evaluation version/demo, so I can’t test them. But I wouldn’t believe them before running a test.

• 6. Joe Stump  |  April 24th, 2006 at 21:30

  I’ve been using Backup 3 for a while now and I must say it’s pretty nice. Not sure how it relates to the ones listed above though. It also requires a .Mac membership.

• 7. maurits  |  April 24th, 2006 at 21:35

  Joe: Precisely, that’s the reason why I haven’t tested Apple Backup yet…

• 8. BubbaGump  |  April 24th, 2006 at 21:43

  Have you evaluated BRU LE from Tolis Group? Could you (they have an eval version)?

  This is very depressing for anyone using tape backups. Apparently Retrospect and BRU are the only tape-aware options available. And it appears Retrospect in it’s current incarnation is worthless — Such a shame, under OS9 Retropect 4.3 was solid.

  BG

• 9. Niko  |  April 24th, 2006 at 21:46

  I backup two hard drives regularly, my laptop (about 50GB) and my music library drive (over 100GB). I want the backup app to mirror the original files and not save the files in any special format (like Retrospect does).

  Apple Backup 3: it has a nice interface, but there is no way to do a “smart backup” like it’s called in Super Duper. The incremental mode only copies changed files, but doesn’t delete old files from the destination. As you can imagine, the backup disk fills up pretty quickly. Like, on the second backup run. Backup 3 also puts the files inside separate packages for each incremental backup run, breaking the original file structure.

  After struggling through most of the options you’ve listed, I found an app that actually came bundled with my Lacie hard drives: SilverKeeper. It’s an oldish application, it looks ugly and not very reliable, but it’s free (for everyone, not just Lacie disk owners) and works like a charm for me. It copies the changed files, nothing more. I haven’t examined the permissions and such in detail, but I’ve never had any problems with files I’ve brought back from the backup disk.

• 10. maurits  |  April 24th, 2006 at 21:53

  Niko: I’ve tested Silverkeeper (see above), and it’s OK if you don’t care about the preservation of BSD flags, HFS+ extended attributes, and ACLs.

• 11. maurits  |  April 24th, 2006 at 21:57

  BubbaGump: Thanks for the pointer. I might include BRU in an update.

• 12. Vic  |  April 24th, 2006 at 22:31

  Here are a few more backup apps that you might want to consider testing.

  Free apps:

  iBackup http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/17007

  BackitMac http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/21172

  Backuplist + http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/21413

  Commercial Apps

  QuickBack (part of Intech SpeedTools) http://www.speedtools.com/

• 13. Eric  |  April 24th, 2006 at 22:48

  The problem with a program like SuperDuper is that if a local file becomes corrupt on your hard disk, the next backup will wipe out valid copy in the archives. You’d never even know until you tried to restore it, possibly years later.

  Anybody tried rdiff-backup?

  http://www.nongnu.org/rdiff-backup/

  Command-line only, but looks useful.

• 14. maurits  |  April 24th, 2006 at 22:58

  Eric: rdiff-backup looks interesting, thanks for pointing this out. They pretend to support resource forks, extended attributes, and ACLs. I’ll add it to my to-do list.

• 15. Al Davidson  |  April 24th, 2006 at 23:13

  Superduper is a piece of utter crap, I can’t tell you the amount of data I’ve lost using their program.

  I’ve used DejaVu running as a System Preference pane ever since and it’s completely effortless and automatic, even auto-cloning/backup drives/files over a network without even being logged in.

  DejaVu has saved the day multiple times and pales in comparison to the complicated SD.

  The author must be a paid off to write this half-assed evaluation.

• 16. maurits  |  April 24th, 2006 at 23:27

  Al: it’s a pity that you give no technical reasons for your verdict. BTW, have you been in contact with Shirt Pocket’s support regarding your problems with SuperDuper?

  As for a “complicated UI”, I explicitly do not judge the UI in this review.

  My evaluation is entirely fact-based, you could check it yourself. So there wouldn’t be any reason for paying me off ;-) Apart from that, I’ve paid my copy of SuperDuper.

• 17. n8  |  April 24th, 2006 at 23:56

  When you get a chance to test, i’d like to see how BRU LE and/or Server stack up. I’ve used it at client sites who use tape autoloaders, and it seems to work well. The CLI and remote management capabilities are handy, too.

  Also, there are a number of higher-end tape-oriented packages from Atempo and Bakbone that are supposed to work well.

  I’ve been interested in some of the OSS offerings, like bacula and dirvish for network backups. I’m not sure how they handle all the metadata, though.

  Thanks for the reviews!

• 18. Jonathon Delacour  |  April 25th, 2006 at 00:16

  Many thanks for taking the time and trouble to put together such an informative (if somewhat dispiriting) analysis.

  Would there be any chance of testing Tri-BACKUP from Tri-EDRE? A 30-day trial version is available.

• 19. maurits  |  April 25th, 2006 at 00:22

  Jonathon: boy, good that you mention this. I had already tested Tri-Backup, but somehow the line got lost when I copied the information from my Excel sheet… I’ve updated the post.

• 20. Thomas McMahon  |  April 25th, 2006 at 00:23

  I was hoping to see iBackup in the list. Maybe you can do a follow-up or round two?

• 21. maurits  |  April 25th, 2006 at 00:24

  Thomas: yes, at the rate that review suggestions flow in at the moment, I’ll definitely have to do a follow-up.

• 22. renravd  |  April 25th, 2006 at 00:28

  Al obviously has some strong emotional connection to anything but SuperDuper. SD saved me after my PB hard drive failed. Took minutes to get me back on line with a new drive.

  I have tried plenty of these things as well and if SD’s interface is poor, then what is good. I find it very easy.

  Thanks for the testing. I originally used Tri-backup from Tri-Edre not too long after OS X came out. It seems like it was one of the first backup solutions for OS X. SD way easier and seems more accurate.

• 23. Sam  |  April 25th, 2006 at 00:54

  15 - Troll post

  Making unsubstantiated statements in contrast to well reasoned and reproducable tests is just bad form. Either regale us with the specifics of SD’s shortcomings, or don’t post at all.

• 24. e:leaf  |  April 25th, 2006 at 01:49

  Do you know of any resources which do a similar test for command line tools? I use an in-house solution abd would like to be sure that I am using the most effective tool available.

  This is a very interesting study, even if the end result is bad news for Mac users. Perhaps this will drive developers to develop better GUI solutions.

• 25. wrf3  |  April 25th, 2006 at 02:53

  I use Retrospect all the time in “Duplicate” mode to clone my laptop drive to an external firewire drive. It has always worked, including restoring data.

  Can you detail the methodology you used that caused Retrospect to have such low marks?

• 26. Steve Nagel  |  April 25th, 2006 at 03:05

  Thanks for the work! I will keep an eye out for any updatings?

• 27. Chris Howard  |  April 25th, 2006 at 03:57

  Maurits

  I was of the impression that the trial .Mac let you use a limited version of Backup which would at least allow you to do your testing.

  I’ve been fairly happy with Backup and did a massive restore from it three weeks ago after my HDD crashed and have not had any operating problems. Just checking, creation dates have been preserved.

  I did have one corrupt incremental backup with Backup which made the whole of that set unusable. So I had to go to another. This is a danger if you depend on one backup set. You can drill down into Backup’s sparseimages and egt files back that way, but I read someone claiming copying form them would lose resource forks.

  I am writing a review of SuperDuper for Apple Matters and will send a link your way for this excelent piece about all the backup software.

• 28. David Gimeno Gost  |  April 25th, 2006 at 05:46

  I wish to thank you for the great work you’ve done here. A year and a half ago I started to realize the sad state of backup solutions for Mac OS X when I tried Carbon Copy Cloner on Panther. I went to the CCC forum to warn users of that utility about the risk of unknowingly losing timestamp information. To my dismay, not only was this an unknown problem there, but the forum “moderator” even laughed at me for suggesting that such a thing could happen with such a proven utility as the venerable ditto. Go figure!

  Since then, I’ve been using several incarnations of rsync, which has become somewhat a hassle since I upgraded to Tiger. I hadn’t switched to something else yet simply because I didn’t trust any of the other solutions either, and I wasn’t willing to thoroughly test them all. And none of the other backup review/recommendation sites I’ve seen so far seemed to “get it” either. Now, you’ve done it.

  Many thanks!

• 29. Simon Gatrall  |  April 25th, 2006 at 06:02

  Like #25 I use Retrospect’s immediate duplicate command to backup my Powerbook drive to an external one. The only issue I’ve ever had with this are some things which encode the name of the root volume into a path. If I rename my external drive to be the same name as my internal, it seems to be “the same”. I don’t do that much which directly interacts with BSD permissions, but I do have some hidden dot files which are chmoded to things other than the normal umask in my home directory.

  Does anything even use ACL?

• 30. links for 2006-04-25 at e&hellip  |  April 25th, 2006 at 07:21

  […] plasticsfuture » Mac Backup Software Harmful (tags: osx backup) […]

• 31. Matthew Barr  |  April 25th, 2006 at 09:02

  just noticed that you tested CCC 2.1, vs the current 2.3.

  Any particular reason?

• 32. LoonyPandora  |  April 25th, 2006 at 09:50

  Nice article, very useful :)

  It would be nice if you could give some details of the methods you used to test all of these solutions - That way we can test all the other backup solutions we want without bugging you saying “please test this…” etc.

  Knowing your methods would make sure the results are good. Even better would be providing an example package for download, containing a variety of files with differing extended attributes, Finder flags etc - so we are using the same methods, and the same files.

  Thanks again!

• 33. christopher  |  April 25th, 2006 at 10:28

  SuperDuper is good but it has one Achilles heel: It does NOT work over a network. The only way get it to do this is to create a disk image on the netork volume and target that. Doing this incurs a HUGE speed hit, making it so slow as to be unuseable… I think yous should re-draw your table to classify the apps into “backup/sync” and “cloaning” tools.

• 34. JimB  |  April 25th, 2006 at 10:43

  How about adding the industrial strength Arkeia” to the mix. I’d love to see how it performs. Not only does it do network backups– it can do live backups of MySQL and Postgres databases.

• 35. maurits  |  April 25th, 2006 at 11:47

  Simon: everybody’s free to enable ACLs on a volume and go ahead using them.

  Matthew: sorry, that was a mistake in the table. Of course, I tested CCC 2.3; or, rather, I didn’t really test CCC — instead, I tested ditto, which is the underlying engine.

  LoonyPandora: this is a great idea. I guess I’ll provide a disk image with my test files and the perl script that did the comparison; hang on for a couple days.

  christopher: Neither did I test the UI, nor the tools’ network capabilities. Everybody’s free to factor those features into the equation and to make an educated decision about what tool to use. It’s not a black-and-white decision, obviously.

  JimB: good suggestion.

• 36. Craig  |  April 25th, 2006 at 14:18

  Any advice/info on YouSoftware’s You Synchronize as a backup vs. cloning tool? Thanks for the useful analysis.

• 37. Aaron Freimark  |  April 25th, 2006 at 14:36

  Retrospect does indeed restore permissions very well, but only when you instruct it to restore or replace an “entire disk.” If you want it to work on a single file, you’ll need to define a folder as a “subvolume.”

  Retrospect is far too confusing to be recomended to most individual users. But we do use it every day to successfully back up — and restore! — hundreds of Macs.

• 38. Angus  |  April 25th, 2006 at 15:25

  Thanks for the reviews. I’ve been using CCC at home and have restored from it once after a disc failure - it seemed fine. Based on your review I might give SD a look for home.

  Work is another matter. Currently we use Retrospect for a combo of tape archival and HD backups. We looked at BRU but the cost was a bit nasty at the time. I’d be interested in a review on it, or any other solution for small networks (incremental, tape, HD).

• 39. Jon Harris  |  April 25th, 2006 at 15:32

  As someone earlier said, what about Personal Backup from Intego (http://www.intego.com).

  Could someone with more technical knowledge than I (not difficult) test this one in a ‘Round 2′?

• 40. Steve Klein  |  April 25th, 2006 at 15:39

  You didn’t review my current favorite backup tool, Backup Simplicity from Qdea: http://qdea.com/pages/pages-bs/bs1.html

  I think it’s built on the same engine as Synchronize! Pro X, which you did you review. I’m a full-time IT Manager, and a part-time consultant — most of my consulting is for home users. I’ve recommended Backup Simplicity for it’s amazingly simple interface. I don’t know if my clients are typical, but most of them are overwhelmed by anything but the simplest interface. Having said that, I’m definitely going to take a look at SuperDuper.

  Also, with regard to retrospect, you didn’t say which version you used. I use Retrospect Server at my day job, backing up roughly 30 Mac & Windows desktops and servers (including a Mac running OS X Server 10.3.9), and I’ve never had a problem with permissions on restored files. Is it possible that their “single-user” products use a different engine than their “commercial-grade” products?

• 41. applewoods&hellip  |  April 25th, 2006 at 16:00

  實實在在地備份…

  plasticsfuture 這篇篇幅頗長的文章比較了 17 個不同的備份或磁碟複製工具，最後作者推薦的是 SuperDuper… 有興趣的朋友可以前往瞧瞧！…

• 42. Jean-Denis  |  April 25th, 2006 at 16:21

  I am looking for a backup solution that triggers automatically when the backup device is plugged in (such as a USB flash drive). Can any listed here do that?

  It seems NTI Shadow 3 can do that. Would you test it too? A 30 days trial is available on NTI web site (www.ntius.com).

  Thanks,

  Jean-Denis

• 43. Anonymous  |  April 25th, 2006 at 16:24

  Maurits, have you filed bug reports with some of these companies.developers to offer your insights and QA data to help them improve their products?

  You obviously have collected a good amount of data and have definable expectations regarding these issues; it’s a good community duty to help improve these products by filing bug reports with their QA groups.

  Posting a critical review of all of these solutions other than SD and then walking away from the responsibility of helping to improve the offending products seems like a bit of a bit of a slanted advertisement pitch for SD to me.

• 44. dproni  |  April 25th, 2006 at 16:44

  It’s good to have information like this but I think that the article has one fundamental flaw - it is analyzing and comparing different classes of software, many of which cannot be considered true backup solutions.

  To me, Backup, Clocking and File Synchronization software are three different categories with admittedly blurred lines of distinction. Each of the programs listed performs better in one of these three areas than others, and to lump them all together as “Backup” software does a disservice to the respective developers and users alike. For example, a program like SuperDuper is not going to help retrieve that set if files accidentally deleted six months ago or keep my desktop and laptop in sync with each other. Conversely, SuperDuper will offer a far more convenient fail-safe than a true backup program will if my main hard drive suddenly decides to take a dump.

  The article also focuses excessively, if not solely, on the preservation of metadata as the criteria for ranking the programs. If this is the intent, I think a more detailed table of what metadata is and isn’t preserved would be much more relevant - and would allow the reader to draw their own conclusions based on what’s important to them. All metadata is not created equal and there is certainly some metadata which is of little or no concern to the overwhelming majority of users.

• 45. dproni  |  April 25th, 2006 at 16:46

  Oops - I meant “Cloning”, not “Clocking” software…

• 46. Kevin Purcell  |  April 25th, 2006 at 17:44

  You don’t mention Tiger’s rsync to copy/backup on the command line. I’d like to see it added to the second round of tests.

  I would presume it preserves all flags as Apple specifically modified it to deal with “regular” Finder/resource metadata in Tiger.

  RsyncX hasn’t been updated in some time (rather suprising given the fixes in Tiger’s rsync). I guess it works well enough for use in their lab or the authors have better things to do.

  Thanks, Kevin

• 47. George Wedding  |  April 25th, 2006 at 17:47

  Whew! 18 different backup options tested plus another half dozen that have yet to be tested. OS X has officially arrived where Windows has long resided — in a place where there are so many freeware, shareware and commercial software options that average users cannot possibly find and select the right piece of backup software that is best for their needs!

  These tests do seem to need more documentation and qualification. Undoubtedly, some are poor products, but as noted, “…Backup, Clocking and File Synchronization software are three different categories with admittedly blurred lines of distinction…”

  At best, even educated and motivated consumers who exercise due diligence in researching products like this may only stumble into the best solution by accident. As Windows users already know, more choices are not always better if all options are mediocre and problematic.

  For now, I’ll continue to use the version of Backup 3 available through .Mac, but with some tredpidation and suspicion.

• 48. Chris Murphy  |  April 25th, 2006 at 17:50

  Great article. I wonder if some of these utilities will be updated as a result? Will you do a follow up article? Please look at BRU for tape backup… I would like to know more about it given the low marks for Retrospect. (there is the kludgy looking program called DV Backup, for backing up to your camcorder, but that’s not an enterprise solution).

• 49. maurits  |  April 25th, 2006 at 18:09

  It seems that some readers overlooked my previous article The State of Backup and Cloning Tools under Mac OS X, which I would consider (strongly) suggested reading before citicizing this article.

  Some random responses:

  Jon: Intego doesn’t seem to offer a trial version, so no go (for me).

  Steve: you’re right, Backup Simplicity probably has the same capabilities as Synchronize! Pro X, although I’d have to check. I did in fact state the Retrospect version, see the table.

  Anonymous: I have filed extensive bug reports with Apple. Apart from that, I don’t see it as my responsibility to do so for every single other tool out there. I wrote this article in my spare time (which already took way too much time) and don’t use any of these products (except for SD), so I have little motivation to do so. If any affected user files a bug report, I’ll be more than happy to provide affected software vendors with details on my tests.

  dproni: As I’ve said before, I explicitly only analyzed the metadata preservation capabilities of tools that can potentially be used for backup purposes. In this analysis, I don’t care about the other features. Everybody is free to factor that into the equation and to make an educated decision. Regarding “I think a more detailed table of what metadata is and isn’t preserved would be much more relevant” — please read my earlier post, which explains the classes of metadata in most meticulous detail.

  Kevin: I do extensively mention rsync and rsync_hfs in my earlier post.

• 50. blurbomac » Blog Ar&hellip  |  April 25th, 2006 at 20:38

  […] This has been long overdue for the Mac. Especially OS X. Read the post here […]

• 51. sjk  |  April 25th, 2006 at 21:07

  Much thanks for writing these informative and insightful articles, maurits. I appreciate the “free” time effort and research you’ve put into this so far, more than some people who’d have gotten paid to do it.

  A few comments mention “successful” backups/restores they’ve done with certain products, yet seem to be overlooking a crucial point of your articles: not all metadata, attributes, etc. are necessarily being restored by said products (regardless of if they’re saved or not during the backup phase). While that may not compromise a system to the point it won’t run it’s certainly not a complete and thorough restore. The potential lack of integrity to the process is what you’ve exposed here. Excellent!

  Personally, I chose SuperDuper! based on my own investigation into those integrity factors you’ve written about. And discussions with Dave Nanian proved to me he deeply understood those issues more than many other developers (some who seemed “surprised” when I mentioned things their products overlooked). That gave me the level of assurance that I’d be purchasing a product I could trust, from developers I believed would handle any unforeseen future issues with it. Now, about two years later (don’t recall offhand when I bought it), that choice has stood the test of time. I always recommend SuperDuper! as the personal cloning backup solution for OS X and will continue to do so.

• 52. The Webteam Blog » &hellip  |  April 25th, 2006 at 22:40

  […] You back up your Mac datafiles regularly and you think your data is safe, right? Wrong. Maurits writes about the (abysmal) state of Mac backups here and here. Hint: If you’re using Retrospect, you should be worried. […]

• 53. Matthias Steffens  |  April 25th, 2006 at 23:21

  Jean-Denis, Synchronize! Pro X is able to do that. It can also mount a network volume for backup and unmount it again when its done. There’s also an option to wake up sleeping machines over the network…

  Regards, Matthias

• 54. Alastair  |  April 25th, 2006 at 23:51

  Great stuff. I’ve been meaning to do some testing like this myself. Couple of questions:

  1. Can you explain your methodology for setting up test files with ACLS, EAs, resource forks, etc? And how did you verify the backup against these test files? Did you use some sort of tool or was it all manual?

  2. Perhaps an obvious question, but what about tar? Or pax? As far as I remember, Apple claims support for metadata and other good stuff in the tiger tar.

• 55. maurits  |  April 25th, 2006 at 23:58

  Alastair: I just assembled a couple files and added resource forks, EAs, and ACLs using the common command-line tools. I’ll probably post an disk image with the test files later.

  I wrote a perl script that dumps all relevant metadata, and compared output with a diff.

  As for tar and pax, it’s probably also a good idea to test them. I smell trouble ahead.

• 56. sjk  |  April 26th, 2006 at 00:21

  SuperDuper is good but it has one Achilles heel: It does NOT work over a network. The only way get it to do this is to create a disk image on the netork volume and target that. Doing this incurs a HUGE speed hit, making it so slow as to be unuseable

  I’m currently backing up about ~25GB on my wife’s eMac to an AFS-mounted disk image volume using SD! over a 100Mbps LAN and that’s definitely not “so slow as to be unusable”. And I’m off doing other things (e.g. sleeping) while that’s running so the amount of time it takes isn’t crucial for me. Of course the rules might change backing up a few hundred GB.

  Making generalized conclusions without evidence to back them seems unhelpful to people interested in objectively evaluating different products for their own particular needs and situations.

• 57. Web Admin  |  April 26th, 2006 at 00:48

  SD is just like any other cloning software, they basically all do the same job to different degree’s. What makes SD different is the clever guerrilla marketing campaign behind it.

  Instead of being very clear cut software and doing it’s job, the software is purposely designed to incurr questions about it’s use.

  This drives users to ShirtPocket forums, to be indoctronated into becoming unwhittingly blog, post and Apple discussions shills for the product.

  The producer of SD and his shills have violated numerous discussion forum rules pertaining to advertising on other sites not his own to generate this guerrilla marketing campaign.

  I know this because I was a head moderator for a popular Mac website which booted this Dave Nanian guy from our forums. Not only that, after much discussion with other web admins and moderators, seems they too have had a problem with him marketing free of charge on their websites.

  Running a website costs money, we depend upon advertising revenue to offset some of these costs. Dave Nanian charges his users money to use the advanced features of his product. And he’s had hundreds of thousands of paid downloads at $20 or so a pop.

  We don’t appreciate how he carelessly uses other Mac forums and unwhitting/willing shills to market his product without fair compensation for our operating costs.

  There is a fair and just way to advertise his product, it’s called banner advertising. It’s a level playing field which all can play honestly and fairly.

  Dave doesn’t seem to think he needs to play by the rules, and since his software makes insecure internet connections running as root to gleam even more marketing data, it will be hell and high water before I recommend his software to anyone.

• 58. maurits  |  April 26th, 2006 at 01:03

  Al Davidson a.k.a. Web Admin:

  1. Please be so kind to use a consistent pseudonym.

  2. If you have a personal issue with Dave Nanian, please don’t fight your private war in somebody else’s (uninvolved person’s) blog comments, especially not based on unsubstantiated allegations. I won’t let you turn this into a flame war.

  3. This is off-topic. I am solely talking about technical merits of the tested products. If you have complaints about some companies’ marketing strategies, please post them on your own blog or in public forums.

  4. This is your last post on the topic of SD marketing, “SD is utter crap”, etc. here. Feel free to make substantiated and on-topic contributions.

• 59. Vic  |  April 26th, 2006 at 01:24

  RE: Intech’s SpeedTools.

  I found this over at Intech’s support forums about which technology QuickBack uses (this backup app wasn’t covered in the above review):

  “I believe that the current revision of QuickBack’s volume copy is based primarily on Ditto, but some additional details are performed when Ditto is complete. The File/Folder backup routines are our own engine - which attempts to preserve more flags and settings than Ditto does.

  As the engineer writing the next major revision of our QuickBack application (I didn’t write the previous version), I can be a bit more descriptive: The next revision (actually, its more like like a rewrite), will solve many (if not all) of the missing details that your review link describes, plus a few others.”

  QuickBack definitely sounds as if it could give SuperDuper! a run for its money. Does anyone here use QuickBack?

• 60. Web Admin  |  April 26th, 2006 at 01:41

  maurits, your remarks are duly noted. This site is yours and I’ll respect your wishes. My apologies to you for my apparant outburst.

  Best regards

  Al

• 61. maurits  |  April 26th, 2006 at 02:01

  Vic: Thanks for posting this snippet. I think it’s great news to hear that at least some parts of the industry take the metadata issue seriously. Let’s hope that others hop on, too.

• 62. Web Admin  |  April 26th, 2006 at 02:45

  maurits,

  We apologize for our outbursts on your open forum.

  Thank you for your informational comparision of the products above.

  sincerly

  Al

  [Editorial comment: your similar comment #60 got caught in my moderation queue, sorry for not spotting it earlier. I hope you see that this is indeed not an open forum. -maurits]

• 63. Manuel  |  April 26th, 2006 at 06:39

  You might want to include Bounceback Pro, I used to recommend it but abandoned it for SuperDuper. http://www.cmsproducts.com/productbouncebacksoftware.htm

• 64. Adrian B  |  April 26th, 2006 at 08:11

  This is the response from the Synk developer:

  http://www.decimus.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=514

  Part of the response:

  - “Doesn’t copy .DS_Store”: True, and deliberate. This choice stems from historical problems with the Finder freaking out when .DS_Stores were copied to a different volume. I actually recently revisited and re-tested it, and modern Finders do not seem to have the problems anymore. 5.2.2 (due out probably in the next week) already had that filter removed. - “Doesn’t preserve owner for locked files”: True, and accidental. Just a simple bug, took me 5 minutes to fix today after I found out about it through the article. It’ll be included with the other changes in 5.2.2. (Sure would have been nicer to just file a bug on it, since it’s just a transient glitch and obviously not indicative of any greater pattern in permissions.) - “Doesn’t preserve BSD flags”: The least used of all of the metadata. No plans for support in v5, implemented in v6. - “Doesn’t preserve xattrs”: No plans for support in v5, has been implemented for months in v6. - “Doesn’t preserve ACLs”: No plans for support in v5, has been implemented for months in v6.

• 65. MacMedic  |  April 26th, 2006 at 15:42

  No mention of Duover here - I use this one for backing up to other volumes on the network. I like its easy GUI for specifiying the authentication to the other volume, and that it dismounts when finished. I hate to throw another “test this for me” request on the pile, but I’d love to know how the metadata is handled. Yes, there’s a fully functional free trial.

• 66. Applesauce & Window P&hellip  |  April 26th, 2006 at 16:42

  […] Well, I just read an article, you can find it here: Plasticsfuture […]

• 67. maurits  |  April 26th, 2006 at 19:17

  Vendor Reponses

  I have received feedback from some vendors; despite some initial disgruntlement this has turned very constructive. The good news is that two vendors so far (of ChronoSynch and Synk) have committed to fixing all the issues raised here. The developer of Synk also provided me with a beta version, which indeed fixed the most serious issues, and boosts my recommendation from “avoid at all cost” to “partially recommended”. Please see the updated table above. Also, the developers of QuickBack, which I haven’t tested here, seem to be committed to making their future products fully metadata-aware.

  Let’s hope that the state of metadata keeps improving. And big kudos to the folks at econ Technologies and Ben Rister for being so responsive!

• 68. cyou  |  April 27th, 2006 at 00:24

  No great surprises at all. My impression is that Bru Backup, originally written for Unix is the only real Backup candidate. Retrospect was never written for a multitasking system. Driver troubles are endless whit Retrospect since Version 4.X Superduper is OK as a cloner.

• 69. Stephen Elliott  |  April 27th, 2006 at 19:47

  Hello, it’s Steve Elliott here - the author of Impression.

  I’m on holiday now, though a friend wrote to inform me that you’d published this piece and included a review of Impression’s meta-data handling capabilities.

  Indeed, Impression uses ‘ditto’ for file-copy archiving operations, or alternatively ‘pax’ (both Apple-authored utilities). Impression’s old mainstay, ‘hfspax’ is no longer useable under Mac OS X 10.4.x and Apple’s ‘pax’ utility is now used instead. Both ‘ditto’ and ‘pax’ have the specific meta-data handling deficiencies that you note, and Impression inherits those facets of their design.

  Your first article correctly points out the meta-data handling deficiencies in Apple-authored command-line tools under 10.4.x; some meta-data is correctly preserved, while other is not (depending on the tool and the meta-data in question).

  I’m working through Radar with Apple’s engineers to constructively fix these known issues in their tools. And in regard to your feature request for Impression to offer the capability to unset the ‘ignore permissions on this volume’ flag - I’ll see that that function is incorporated and tested for the next forthcoming dot release. Thanks for your feature request - normally I get requests in a polite eMail from folks, but this will do.

  In the future, I’d love to hear of your concerns firsthand as opposed to getting links from others. Just drop me a note if you’ve something to say; I reply to a majority of Impression’s correspondence and work fastidiously to fix bugs and incorporate feature requests (see Impression’s long, detailed version history list for reference).

  Best,

  Steve Elliott Babel Company

• 70. maurits  |  April 27th, 2006 at 20:24

  Steve,

  thanks for responding to my article!

  After having received similar criticism from other vendors, I agree now that it would probably have been somewhat better style to inform vendors upfront of my review; however, it never came to my mind that this piece would get the enormous coverage (which brings added responsibility) it eventually did.

  I still have no reason to believe that the facts in my article contain significant mistakes, and no part of this article is meant derogatory or negative in an unobjective way; when I chose strong wording for my recommendations, that’s because I think it’s appropriate. Backup tools are no screen savers — they deserve a drastically more fastidious scale of judgment.

  Even if you or other vendors had known about this beforehand, it wouldn’t have changed the results of the tests; you and your competitors would only have had the opportunity to correct factual errors in the article, of which none have been discovered yet.

  In the end, all vendors I’ve been in contact so far have eventually seen that the gist of my article is to give a solely constructive impulse to the industry, and I guess you agree with that.

  I am happy to hear that you take the list of my issues seriously (also see added comment in the list above). It is of course extremely unfortunate for you and other folks like the CCC developer, who rely on buggy Apple tools, that there is little to remedy the situation unless Apple fixes these egregious bugs. But given the fact that these bugs exist for years now (you, I, and probably gazillions of other developers must have written numerous duplicate bug reports already), I have little hope that Apple is seriously committed to fixing bugs such as these.

  Again thanks for writing, and I appreciate the constructive dialog! There’s probably going to be a second installment of this article down the road; you’ll hear about it first.

  Have a nice remainder of your holiday!

  Best,

  maurits

• 71. Bill  |  April 27th, 2006 at 20:59

  I believe Bounceback is what is byndled with Seagate firewire harddrived.

• 72. Scott Lamb  |  April 28th, 2006 at 04:12

  Use rdiff-backup!

  It’s designed for transfer to another drive or across the network with ssh, which is a much more realistic model than pumping in DVD-R after DVD-R. It uses rsync to cut down transfer times. It keeps deltas of older versions on the backup machine in case it takes you a while to discover data loss. It preserves all the metadata you’re looking for, even when the destination filesystem that doesn’t support it. (I use it to backup resource-fork-heavy Quicken files to a Linux machine.)

  As a bonus, the same program works well for backing up other operating systems and even servers. It can be chained together to chain it together with scripts that do application-specific things to obtain a consistent backup (pgsql-dump, “svnadmin hotcopy”, lvm snapshots, whatever). I use it for my entire network.

• 73. links for 2006-04-28 | Ed&hellip  |  April 28th, 2006 at 08:22

  […] Mac Backup Software Harmful Basically, only SuperDuper is trustworthy. (tags: superduper mac osx backup sysadmin) […]

• 74. Gueorgui  |  April 28th, 2006 at 09:48

  Maurits, you can get a demo version of Personal Backup X4 by downloading an update from the Intego website (”support and services” in the menu, then “software updates”). If installed without a serial, the software will work for 30 days.

• 75. Andreas  |  April 28th, 2006 at 18:58

  Looks like your review has caused the first casualty: “After three long years of development and support, Impression has enjoyed a good run.

  Unfortunately, due to a lack of available resources and time on my end I’m discontinuing Impression effective immediately.”

• 76. Jim  |  April 28th, 2006 at 23:37

  With regard to SuperDuper bashing—it saved my bacon a couple years ago when I drive went down. This article is timely—last night I was getting ready to backup a newer Mac to a new Firewire drive. I opened SuperDuper, downloaded the update, and then it wouldn’t recognize me as a registered user.

  Emailed support at 9:20 PM CDT. Got an email back from Dave at 10:05 PM CDT with the fix (that worked). You wonder why he sells copies—it’s because the software works and the company is responsive.

• 77. Steve Klein  |  April 29th, 2006 at 01:07

  “I did in fact state the Retrospect version, see the table.”

  Poor choice of wording on my part. not version, but perhaps “edition.” There’s Retrospect Express, Retrospect Desktop, Retrospect Workgroup and Retrospect Server.

  So which edition did you test?

• 78. Andrew Ferguson  |  April 29th, 2006 at 06:28

  Regarding rdiff-backup (http://www.nongnu.org/rdiff-backup/):

  It does NOT support BSD flags or ACLs on Mac OS X (it does support ACLs under Linux and FreeBSD). rdiff-backup is written in python and relies on pylibacl for ACL support. Currently, pylibacl does not support Tiger ACLs because they are somewhat nonstandard. Although Tiger ACLs use the POSIX 1003.1e API (like Linux and FreeBSD), they do not use the POSIX types and are instead stored in an Apple-custom binary format (see /usr/include/sys/acl.h)

  rdiff-backup DOES support everything else (although using HFS+ extended attributes requires a patch that I just submitted to the author and the xattr python module). In particular, it supports resource forks, content type and creator codes, creation time, user modes, and Finder comments.

  The amazing part about rdiff-backup is that it is able to backup files from OS X on HFS+ to, say, Linux on the ext3 filesystem and restore them while preserving everything I mentioned! It’s at its best in a heavily networked environment with many types of servers since it supports so many operating systems.

  Use the CVS version (or at least the development release). Many users have found them very stable and full of features.

• 79. Henrik Nørgaard Hansen  |  April 29th, 2006 at 13:29

  Very interesting article indeed.

  I think you should reconsider you verdict on Retrospect. It appears to based on a misunderstanding of how the restore modes of Retrospect works.

  You ask “Does anybody have any clues why Retrospect performs so badly?” Yes we do.

  Aaron Freimark have stated quite clearly how Retrospect works. He also correctly stated that Retrospect is not everyone, partly because of this.

  By answering the question from wrf3: “Can you detail the methodology you used that caused Retrospect to have such low marks?” would reveal to enable us to clarify why the test fails.

  Lastly your “footnote a” points to a discussion of Retrospect Express which I don’t think has the samu UI as Retrospect.

  PS: what is up with the formatting. Every piece of text since post #72 is a link to www.cmsproducts.com.

  Regards,

  Henrik Longtime lover of Retrospect :-)

• 80. chrisdiclerico.com »&hellip  |  April 30th, 2006 at 06:48

  […] SuperDuper! is the worst name for the best backup software I have ever used. It does exactly what I want it to. You have some options about priority (which drive overwrites which drive) but basically it simply duplicates all the data from your main drive onto the backup drive, and subsequently replaces older files with new ones and adds new files. Perfect synching every time. You can read some reviews (this boingboing one is how I found the software in the first place), all outstanding, if you need proof. In this recent roundup, this reviewer found that ALL other backup software had problems saving meta data and could many problems. SuperDuper! was the only software given a “Highly Recommended” score. In fact, some of the other companies should be sued if this analysis is accurate. […]

• 81. doug-miller.net: doug mil&hellip  |  April 30th, 2006 at 21:16

  […] Mac Backup Harmful. An exhaustive comparison of Mac backup tools indicates most are problematic in producing a restorable volume. Only SuperDuper! performs as expected. I use SuperDuper! and can attest to it’s effectiveness; if you are concerned about Mac backup (and you should be if you use a Mac) you ought to be using this software. […]

• 82. jeglin  |  April 30th, 2006 at 23:22

  I’ll refrain from using Al’s words to avoid reprimand :-)

  I had a one-time cloning job - put the contents of an 80GB Tiger Server (+50 users) installation onto a new 250GB drive, freshly formatted. SuperDuper left me with an unbootable mess. Turned immediately to Carbon Copy Cloner and it worked without issue, first time. I had heard so much about SD and was going to switch to it… until I witnessed this.

  I’m a busy person - no time to waste on software that fails. I don’t particularly like CCC, but SD is in the wastebasket where it belongs. Obviously others’ mileage varies. Word to the wise: do these things conservatively, and test test test.

• 83. sjk  |  April 30th, 2006 at 23:54

  Correct me if I’m wrong, but from your description of the problem with SD it doesn’t sound like you even tried getting support from Shirt Pocket before trashing the app.

• 84. Victor Panlilio  |  May 1st, 2006 at 03:50

  I recently had to restore data from a client’s degraded OS X 10.4 RAID 1 slice to a new two-drive RAID 1 array, and the only software that would restore all of the data (180+GB) was — SuperDuper 2.1. Automatic RAID rebuild wouldn’t, Finder copy failed, CCC 2.3 aborted@40GB. SD copied all the data, but for some reason not the ACLs. At home I use a combo of Backup 3 (to .Mac and a local network volume) and SilverKeeper 1.1.4 for daily incrementals, and CCC or SuperDuper for disk cloning. I still haven’t figured out how to use Retrospect properly, after all these years.

• 85. BadgerB  |  May 1st, 2006 at 17:13

  Hi, after reading your blog, I used SuperDuper 2.1, here’s my report:

  I used it to backup/clone my harddisk to a diskimage on an external harddisk, but it will be the last time I tried. Backup took 3 hours that I couldn’t use productive, and after I returned, it turned out that SuperDuper successfully performed its operation (as indicated in the log by the lines

  “Evaluated 457618 items occupying 66.29 GB (75089 directories, 377223 files, 5306 symlinks) | 05:08:11 PM | Info | Copied 532543 items totaling 65.88 GB (75065 directories, 377112 files, 80366 symlinks) | 05:08:11 PM | Info | Cloned 65.88 GB of data in 7496 seconds at an effective transfer rate of 9.00 MB/s”

  ), but then it encountered a minor error (it wasn’t able to convert the resulting image to a read-only image), and so it subsequently deleted the whole backup. The log didn’t even mention it, just this error apeared:

  “| 05:20:16 PM | Error | hdiutil: convert failed - Auf dem Gerät ist kein Platz verfügbar (no space left on device)”

  This is an outrage. A software that takes away so many hours should be programmed safe enough to not commit suicide and take its data with it. Furthermore, it looks like this app will need double the space on my already big main harddisc for the external backup harddisc (which is why the error was raised), and it needs this huge space just to perform one minor conversion at the end. I will move back to CCC now, which is awkward, but at least it fulfills its duty.

  So, since the app did such a bad job once, this leaves the question “will I ever be able to trust it again’”. And “will you be able to trust it”. I think, no. After looking through your list, and seeing that not a single solution can be wholeheartedly recommended, I feel that the state of Mac backups is indeed at a very bad low point.

• 86. TGA  |  May 1st, 2006 at 19:30

  check those apps: Phew http://www.substancesoftware.com/phew/index.html iMsafe http://homepage.mac.com/sweetcocoa/imsafe/

• 87. maurits  |  May 1st, 2006 at 23:36

  Sorry for not reponding during the last couple of days — I was away from my computer.

  Thanks for all who suggested even more backup programs that I wasn’t aware of yet.

  Andreas: yes — Steve Elliott (the Impression author) has also told me of Impression’s demise. As far as I can tell, this metadata headache was the last straw in this. I have highest respect for Steve for taking this decision. Apple could do a lot more in terms of providing more comprehensive, higher quality, and better tested APIs for developers like Steve, such that they can afford to put out nice tools like the former Impression, and not waste hundreds of hours in chasing Apple’s bugs and filling in holes in their APIs.

  Steve Klein: Sorry for misunderstanding you. I downloaded the trial from the EMC website; so I think it was the Desktop version. There shouldn’t be any differences between Desktop and Workgroup/Server in terms of backup engine, right? Where in the program can I see what edition I got (short of dowloading a new copy?)

  BadgerB: could be that this is an annoying bug in SD’s error handling, but I’d check with their tech support. BTW, you can easily set SD to backup to a sparse image (I do this for partitions that don’t compress that much anyway, e.g., partitions that contain music and pictures). If you do this, there is no difference in output format compared with CCC (both make sparse images). If you chose a compressed disk image as target, SD actually warns about the extra disk space needed upfront. There are actually some good (technical) reasons to chose a compressed image as format, in which case the conversion is technically necessary and there is no way to circumvent the double disk space requirement. You can do the same conversion manually with disk images generated by CCC. I have no reason to defend SD (except for the fact that I’m a SD user, which should be no surprise given this article), but the facts aren’t quite as outrageous as you describe it.

• 88. Nerdy News in April at Ge&hellip  |  May 2nd, 2006 at 05:58

  […] Apparently, there aren’t really any good backup solutions for OS X. There are a couple of OK ones, but no good ones. In related news, the staff at Geek Patrol were not surprised at this revelation in the least. […]

• 89. Jussi Hirvi  |  May 2nd, 2006 at 10:28

  Thanks for the article. Very interesting! About CCC. you mention that you didn’t really test 2.3 but assumed that it uses ditto. I made a scheduled backup script with v2.3, and it uses ditto only for items on desktop. For directories, it uses psync.

• 90. maurits  |  May 2nd, 2006 at 20:10

  Jussi: the main cloning operation in CCC uses ditto throughout. Further (scheduled) synchronizations of the clone with the original data can be performed via the CCC GUI, and you’re right, CCC uses psync for this under the hood (it relies on a system install of psync).

• 91. David Zatz  |  May 5th, 2006 at 16:35

  Regarding Intego Personal Backup: I foolishly bought it assumign their marketing materials were fully accurate. What I found was nothing that was an outright lie, but a lot of half-truths. It is roughly useless for backing up to DVD and is a truly lightweight app generally speaking.

  If the author of this page would like my copy I’d be happy to send it over and take the hundred-dollar loss as a contribution to this rather nice site.

  After getting IPB, I decided not to get VirusBarrier.

• 92. David Zatz  |  May 5th, 2006 at 16:36

  Um. Additional. I’d like to ask the author if there are any backup programs I can use to back up my Mac to a part of my colocated Web server which runs Linux. I need the ddata to be encrypted in transit and once there. Thanks…

• 93. slimeyapple  |  May 6th, 2006 at 03:26

  Thank you for taking the time to research this so thoroughly. I recently used CarbonCopyCloner to make my In case of emergency back up to an external HD. I have SuperDuper installed - and I am going to -re-backup- based on your results.

  Nice work with the research!

• 94. Buggy-Net.de » Back&hellip  |  May 7th, 2006 at 10:11

  […] blog.plasticsfuture.org […]

• 95. Steve  |  May 8th, 2006 at 16:19

  Apple’s Backup 3 is, in my experience, the very worst backup software available. It looks like it might be workig well when you use it as an adjunct for file backuup. However, should you suffer a disk crash, it appears difficult to retrieve your files from your iDisk - - or any other place you have put the backup files. .Mac support stated that if there have been serious directory problems, Backup 3 may have trouble reconstructing its catalog - precisely the moment you would need it to perform this function. Despite extensive e-mail contact .Mac support offered no solution that actually worked. They suggested that I go through each of the 400 backup files on the iDisk to determine in which ones I could find the files I need. Backup 3 also failed to restore a large file backup to an external disk.

  Luckily I was using Backup 3 as an adjunct to Carbon Copy Cloner and Retrospect and was, therefore able to restore my files. If my experience is any indicator, Backup 3 provides an illusion of saftety, but completely fails in the precise circumstance in which a backup program is needed. In other words, it seems to be merely a marketing device aimed at selling .Mac subscriptions - - not something that is capable of performing any of the services one might expect from backup software.

  I must say that over the years Retrospect has saved the day on numerous occasions - - and of those products tested it appears to be the only that works with tape. It does not make good clones, but it does backup in its own format fairly well. In April 2005 I downloaded Virex 7.5.2 from the .Mac site. I set it to scan and repair. When I returned, Virex 7.5.2 had succesfully erased every file on every disk connected internally or externally to my G5 - - except parts of the OS and, of course, itself. Luckily, I had a triplicate tape backup (Exabyte VXA-1) After several hours, Retrospect, running from its own startup CD, reconstructed its catalog and restored the disk. The restore was not perfect, and I had to do an Archive and Install of the OS. On the other hand, I recovered all my files.

• 96. John Langrill  |  May 9th, 2006 at 21:46

  I’ve used JAMF Software cloning before, which worked very well (before most cloning programs were available). Casper should be added to the list for evaluation.

  http://www.jamfsoftware.com/products/casper/

• 97. John Williams  |  May 10th, 2006 at 03:27

  Great article, and as seen in the comments, a few apps not tested initially. I’d like to see NTI Shadow 3 tested, as this is what I use, but there is also CopyCatX from Sunrosasoft that looks like it would do a great job of cloning a drive - from any system, and all on your Mac! I’m running a small business aimed directly at getting businesses to back-up their systems and files, and these two products look like they fit the bill for me. However, my first and foremost aim is to get people (at home or work) backing their files up, so this sort of comparison is extremely useful for everyone. THANKYOU! Any feedback always welcome, keep up the good work Maurits. P.S. Now that we have the ability to run any OS on our Intel-equipped Macs, doesn’t this allow us to take advantage of each OS’ potential, all on one machine, & native!

• 98. Organized Mess » On&hellip  |  May 12th, 2006 at 22:50

  […] Here is a good assessment of the tools available for the Mac. My problem is that I do not want a solution that is Mac-based. It has to run on multiple platform. […]

• 99. pcb  |  May 13th, 2006 at 16:01

  Your article seems good (I’m not computer savvy enough to know for sure). I see all sorts of theory in this and other web postings as to why people shouldn’t use Retrospect. Thing is, life is not all theory, so let me offer some practical advice to your readers:

  I’ve been responsible for backing up and archiving the data for our 2 person business since 1989. We lose our data, we’re out of business. I started using Retrospect in the early 1990s and have been using it since. In all that time, we have not lost one single file (assuming it was backed up, of course). I can still pull old jobs off the archives from tape with ease. Some of these jobs are almost 15 years old (if memory serves) and the applications won’t even run on any modern computer but the files are still there and easy to locate–just in case something can be done with them. Retrospect’s interface is confusing. That’s true. OTOH, if you learn how to use it, you can set up all sorts of scripts to automate everything and you can control what you want done very well. You can back up to virtually any media, and you do incremental back ups (not replacing a changed file but rather saving ALL subsequent versions). You can control all manner of options. You can make a duplicate of your drive that boots like a champ and whenever you update the duplicate, it will just copy the changed files over.

  So, let’s look at this logically. You go out get yourself SD and you clone your drive. Fine. Now what? No incremental backups? Man, you’re living dangerously. What about cataloging the files so they are easy to locate? Do you get something else to the incremental BUs? If so, what? Are you going to buy, learn and support 2 pieces of BU software to get your BUs done? What about archiving? What about offsite BUs? Are you just going to get yourself another HD or two and take a clone offsite or are you going to do incremental BUs to DVD or tape? How will SD handle all that? See, the answers are not so simple. I understand that this is not the scope of your article but if you are writing about BUs, the key is the data, not the theory or methodology.

  Anyway, just adding to the mix.

• 100. charlieartist  |  May 17th, 2006 at 18:11

  I have been using Retrospect in different locations for years now. Aside from some minor glitches at times (execution errors due to foreign content), things have been working well and largelly trouble free. On the metadata issues, I have not (luckily) had to deal with any hardware failures on this regimen, but I have had to restore corrupt files (I’m in publishing, and that happens on deadline!). The corrupted file was restored to the previous day’s work, and there were no date/other metadata issues with the resulting files.

  Like others have posted, Retrospect may have a bit of a learning curve, but it does give peace of mind…

• 101. Andi  |  May 22nd, 2006 at 07:56

  TRI-Backup and files on desktop Dear all, after a crash and a problem with the logical structure of the hard disk (double-click on some folder caused kernel panic) I reinstalled 10.3, then 10.3.9) and copied my backup created with TRI-Backup back to the harddisk. Then I saw that all files on my desktop weren’t copied. With 10.3 I found out that the find doesn’t find files on the desktop. Did anybody run into the same behavior? Is the desktop something special besides being hidden? Thanks Andi

• 102. kai  |  May 25th, 2006 at 01:01

  We use Bakbone’s NetVault SE (http://www.bakbone.com) on Mac OS X as a solid backup solution (for backing up to tape). It would be interesting to get the perl script and set of sample files you used so we can test other solutions and post our results…

  Cheers, Kai

• 103. Dadan  |  May 26th, 2006 at 03:55

  What about FoldersSynchronizer X by Softobe? I’ve used it for a few years now. WWW.softobe.com

• 104. Dima  |  May 27th, 2006 at 15:53

  Cool article! Nevertheless, you’ve missed Dobry Backuper.

  Dobry is cheap and awesome backup tool. It can back up to any mounted drive, including external and network drives, supports multi-volume, compressed archives and employs the standard tar-compatible format, which means that data can be restored even without Dobry Backuper. Built-in schedule allows to back up in an automatic mode.

• 105. Marc Gray  |  May 27th, 2006 at 19:42

  I use the “QuickBack 2.1.8″ module from within Mac Speed Tool Utilities 2.3 (Intech Software) I have found this to do a fine and directly understandable backyp / synch /cloning job for me.

• 106. concrete  |  May 28th, 2006 at 06:12

  Hi have you had a chance to test LifeBoat? from Mojaveshade www.mojaveshade.com/

  Love to know what you think, have purchased a copy and testing now.

• 107. n8gray  |  May 28th, 2006 at 06:13

  Earlier today I read the command-line tool reviews and now I found these ones. It’s truly awesome that you do the work to review these products, but as the comments have shown, you can’t cover everything. Also, it won’t be long before new versions of many of the tools you reviewed are released. You would do a great service by making your testing tools public so we can each try out our favorite backup tool and report the results. (Earlier you said you were planning to release your code — maybe you forgot or got too busy?) It’s like the slashdot sig says: “Give a man a fire and you warm him for a night. Set a man on fire and you warm him for the rest of his life.” Or something like that…

• 108. Paul M  |  May 29th, 2006 at 22:20

  I agree with Steve (post 95) re backup 3. I had to restore my HD ans Backup could not access the files even though I could point to them. Useless. Luckily I also had a bootable clone on an external firewire drive, thanks to SuperDuper which solved the problem.

  It’s a shame as the idea of Backup 3 is excellent, not so the execution.

• 109. Adrian  |  May 31st, 2006 at 19:17

  Excellent article. And perfect timing for me to discover it since I’m about to buy. One question though, given how long it’s been around, why wasn’t Stuffit (Allume.com) featured?

• 110. Marie  |  June 3rd, 2006 at 03:20

  http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/backup-macosx.html?@867.DDgEbD6djjo@

  Hi,

  Thanks for this article ! I have some comments about Retrospect: If you want to really have a software which allow a strong Backup strategy. Retrospect is the BEST even if it is so hard to understand !! I bought this wonderful ebook: Take Control of Mac OS X Backups http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/backup-macosx.html?@867.DDgEbD6djjo@

  And it help me to understand what is Retrospect and how to use it well.

  Before to upgrade to tiger for Panther, I did a “Duplicate” (not Backup, means something different for Retrospect) of Panther on a external hard disk. And often, I boot from this “Panther on external HD”, to work with some codes that is not “Tiger ready”. The “duplicate”, “Backup” and “Archive” options of retrospect give a complete backup strategy. Once you set it up it amazing !!!

  If you want just to make a bootable copy of your Mac, I guess SD is quick and fine, but if you really what a strong backup strategy GO FOR RETROSPECT !

• 111. maurits  |  June 3rd, 2006 at 04:19

  Adrian: at this time, I didn’t cover archiving solutions, just ones for copying files.

• 112. Martin  |  June 8th, 2006 at 11:42

  Currently I play around with Unison to sync my laptop with my desktop system and vice versa. any other tools around that come close to Unison’s CVS-like bidirectional “diff and merge” capabilities?

  PS: I remember a Retrospect sales guy a long time ago, saying something like “we don’t store/restore ownership, permissions and other metadata for files backed up via NFS mounts, because our customers don’t want/need this feature” :o)

• 113. concrete  |  June 9th, 2006 at 05:18

  are you updating ChronoSync’s recommendation? It has been updated. ChronoSync is now 3.3

• 114. pchem  |  June 10th, 2006 at 22:52

  About two years ago I purchased a 200 GB Seagate External HD for use with my dual 2 GHz Mac G5, running Panther. I connected the HD to my Mac using the firewire connection, and backed up daily using BounceBack Express (BBE), which was included with the HD. Within about a month, my Mac began to crash regularly (2-3 times per week). I initially had no idea what was causing the crashing, but after lots of testing I found that if disconnected the drive my machine crashed far less frequently (the reason it didn’t go away completely may have been that the frequent crashing corrupted my internal HD). I contacted Seagate tech support, and they said there had been similar issues with other Mac users using their external HDs with firewire and BBE. They sent me a link to an updated version of BBE, but that didn’t fix the problem. So I deleted BBE, did an archive reinstall of my OS and stopped using the Seagate drive. Result: no more crashes. Then, at Seagate’s suggestion, I tried it once more, this time instead using the USB connection and a still newer version of BBE. Result: my machine immediately began to crash again, and my internal HD again became corrupted (I had keys out of order, which disk utility could fix, and superblock errors, which it could not). [A bad crash came when the automatic backup was called to run while I was running another program that was continuously creating and overwriting tens of thousands of files; perhaps, knowing my other program would be running, I should have disabled the automatic backup that night. However, let me emphasize that, except for this one instance, I had not been backing up while large programs were running.] This time I wiped the disk clean and reinstalled everything. Needless to say I will no longer be using BBE.

• 115. HTLmac  |  June 14th, 2006 at 22:53

  SD did not keep my DRM for acrobat 7 digital edition (ebooks), when I tried it earlier this week. diskUtil in 10.3.9 did not work, either.

  I reverted back to “dd” so to have a true copy of my OSX install volume. I know it’s time consuming to back up the whole volume but it’s the only one I found to work reliably.

• 116. abey  |  June 15th, 2006 at 08:02

  Thanks maurits for this most useful review.

  However, there is an aspect that you did not cover and that could be of importance. What happens whis backup to simple file system, for example to a FAT32 (who would do that?!) or a SMB share (more common maybe)? Even if the soft takes care of copying all the meta data, the FS does not support it anyway. Is any of the software you mention capable of special handling of these FS or is it a complete no-go? (I am personally interested in backuping my stuff to a SMB share.)

• 117. Steve Riggins  |  June 15th, 2006 at 17:03

  could you please re-test with ChronoSync 3.3.0 and let us users of that software know if we’re hosed? :)

  I use it to do machine to machine syncs. I use SuperDuper! for cloning.

• 118. Dogbowl » Blog Arch&hellip  |  June 19th, 2006 at 15:50

  […] Coincidentally, there have been several blogposts recently on Mac OSX backup tools. Perhaps too much information, as I find making a decision on what to use a mind-bending exercise. The most informative is Mac Backup Software Harmful. The others can be found here. […]

• 119. haskellf  |  June 20th, 2006 at 02:42

  Fantastic information. Great research Maurits !!!

  Does anyone know of any backup software for the mac that will stream to multiple DVD’s WITHOUT spliting files AND will allow you to copy individual files (this is not a full restore - which would require the software) from that backup DVD without the need of the software? I’m not talking abouit archiving, just copying/backup. So far the backup software I have seen always splits files when a DVD gets full. i.e. Tri-Backup, Retrospect, iBackup.

  Anyone?

• 120. maurits  |  June 20th, 2006 at 02:53

  While I appreciate everyone’s comments, I’d like to ask my readers to constrain their comments to questions immediately concerning either the content of my post or metadata preservation in general. The intention of my post was never to provide a discussion of backup tools’ features or usability aspects. The usefulness of the numerous valuable on-topic remarks (now already at a mind-boggling 119 pieces) would get watered down if this developed into a general discussion of backup tools. There are far better forums for such a discussion.

  Thanks for your understanding.

• 121. Rob  |  June 20th, 2006 at 08:25

  Can I just contribute Dobry Backuper for any future tests. I don’t think it’s been mentioned. Cheers.

  http://dobrysoft.com/products/backuper/

• 122. Kevin Horn  |  June 20th, 2006 at 17:50

  I’ve been using SD for over a year and have found it to be excellent in every respect, but I must admit I don’t have your technical know-how so I was very pleased to see you recommend it highly.

  And what I often tell people is the author of SD provides the best support I’ve ever seen from any company, not just software or computer companies, and that’s worth a lot to me. And I do not have any financial stake in the company in any way, I’m just an average user of the product.

  Apple’s Backup does not create a clone as far as I know, unless they changed that with version 3 which I haven’t used. But I have a .mac membership so Backup is free and I did try it, but felt paying for SD was the better solution.

  More than once I’ve booted off of SD’s clone in order to meet deadlines, going back to fix problems days later, and I found working from the clone identical in every way. In fact, after a few days I’d start to forget I’m on a clone.

• 123. haskellf  |  June 20th, 2006 at 19:23

  Hi Maurits, Sorry about the last posting, I thought it was an open forum for backup software. After reading Gueorgui’s posting I sent an email to intego regarding Personal Backupx4 and they pass along the following info and a link to a 30 day trial version. If you have the chance, please include Personal Backup x4 for you next set of test. -Thanks, Haskell

  The answer to your question will depend on the media set as the destination. If you are copying to another drive formatted as HFS + then all file metadata is preserved, including permissions. However, if you have a drive set as your destination that is not formatted as HFS+ (say it’s Fat 32), the permissions will no be copied nor the BSD flags or HFS+ attributes, but the created and modified dates will be.

  You can download a 30 day trial version from here if you wish to try it out for free: http://www.integodownload.com/en/pbx4.html

• 124. maurits  |  June 20th, 2006 at 19:39

  Rob - Dobry has indeed been brought up here by the developers themselves.

  haskellf - no probs. Thanks for that good information!

• 125. Adrian  |  June 21st, 2006 at 18:19

  You (and Dave Nanian’s website) convinced me that the obvious choice for a bootable clone is SuperDuper! Thanks for satisfying my curiosity (Stuffit=archive, not copying. Also found it’s getting bad press). So I’m still looking for a file level program. Which, from your two excellent articles, means I’m off to check out Synk and Deja Vu…

• 126. Adrian  |  June 22nd, 2006 at 19:03

  And the winner is… Superduper! for bootable clones. Synk for documents and archiving. (New version 6 out.) Once again, thanks maurits, for pointing us all in the right direction.

• 127. Xander  |  June 24th, 2006 at 11:52

  I tested BRU last year (early 2005). Looked very good at first sight but showed a nasty effect with differential backups: Since bru is made for servers, diffs will only work, if the machine (the account, to be prcise) never has been turned off between the original full backup and the diff. This is not precisely a metadata problem, but nevertheless some kind of problem in some cases :)

• 128. dblookup.info&hellip  |  June 29th, 2006 at 19:42

  SVN Homedir strategy ?…

  “Your data are as safe as your latest backup”
  I don’t remenber where I read that, but it made me buy SuperDuper two months ago, I’m still figuring out how to make the most of it by excluding Multimedia files from daily backup....
  

• 129. paul  |  July 2nd, 2006 at 09:20

  Have a look at www.click2backup.com for a windows and Mac OSX online backup client. The software is from Attix5 which have a large Corporate market and are now moving into the SOHO and home backup marketplace.

• 130. Haskellf  |  July 3rd, 2006 at 19:04

  Mauritis research has allowed me to ask the right questions about backup software that I was never aware of before. Using this knowledge, I was able to send out emails to various backup software companies and here is one that returned my email in regards to copying metadata, permissions, etc… as explained by Maurits. Note that I have not tested this myself.

  Tri-BACKUP can copy files without owner/group/permissions information, if the Copy UID/GID option is not checked (this is helpfull if you want to copy files owned by another user to your own Home folder, and want the copy owned by you).

  But if you want an exact copy, Tri-BACKUP will create a copy preserving the same owner/group/permissions, HFS+ extended attributes, resources fork, BSD flags, etc. Folders infomation are also copied.

  We use our own copy routines, and files are not splitted when spaning to multiple DVD’s. When there is not enough space to copy the next file, the entire file will be copied on the next partition.

  Note that the demo version can help you checking this.

• 131. heavyboots  |  July 5th, 2006 at 23:14

  Hmmm, I use the psync command line tool regularly and it does a decent job. And Retrospect 6.1 does a fine job as an archiving/backup utility. We do nightly backups and archiving in it of our G5 file server with no issue whatsoever. (Retrospect 5, however, is bad! Avoid that version.)

  Things that cause major issues in Retrospect are generally incomplete understanding of it (not the most user-friendly beast!) or failing equipment/SCSI chain. Retrospect assumes perfect hardware and if there is a hiccup, it can be pretty disastrous to it…

• 132. Anabolism  |  July 19th, 2006 at 02:17

  The review says Retrospect “completely clobbers permissions, doesn’t preserve modification date of folders [see footnote a], doesn’t preserve ACLs”.

  I’ve used Retrospect for years, and have restored many volumes with it. All I can think of is that you tested doing a file restore, as opposed to a volume restore. That is, you restored selected files. Retrospect has very different modes of operation for restoring specific files (such as if a file was accidently deleted or you want to get an older version of it) and for restoring volumes. I can believe that the metadata would be restored only in the volume restore mode.

• 133. Keven Fedirko  |  July 20th, 2006 at 02:55

  I’m excited to find a cloning program today, so I’ll be trying out SD - but w/regards to Retrospect, I initially (for about 5 years) thought it was great - was able to backup to tape incrementally (from a mac os9) to a DLT drive and to CD-R media. Restores were painless, and perfect (vs. often in Irix, asking for a file, and waiting 2hrs - only to see a blank command line prompt). Years later, my internal HD went bad. Tried to restore from my weekly RS backups various files, and backups I made by hand with Toast. For some reason many files somehow fell between the cracks. v.disheartening.

  For years metadata backup was not an issue, until I started working for another company - and it was paramount. Talking to RS revealed [then - circa 2001/02] that it did not backup that data. The only solution seemed to be to archive it with Stuffit, and then back that up. Works, but such a pain in the butt, and v.time consuming. I tried backing up to DVD-R a year or two ago, but it would never properly continue onto the second disc, rendering the backup worthless.

• 134. Backup? - Apfeltalk&hellip  |  July 20th, 2006 at 20:36

  […] permalink F�r mich sind komplette Backups am sinnvollsten, da ich im Notfall schnell wieder das komplette System r�ckspielen m�chte. Zu SuperDuper! gibt es f�r mich kaum eine Alternative. Zum einen ist es mit dem Smart Backup (nur ge�nderte Daten sichern) wirklich sauschnell, zum anderen sicher es wirklich alles korrekt und macht den Backup zuverl�ssig bootf�hig. Kann ich uneingeschr�nkt empfehlen. __________________ � �h, Mr. Tod, k�nnten Sie uns erkl�ren, warum wir alle gleichzeitig gestorben sind?! � � Die Lachsschaumspeise. � […]

• 135. SuperDuper! Wo Lizenz kau&hellip  |  July 29th, 2006 at 23:59

  […] Zitat von Cohen76 Und CCC funktioniert auch genauso gut, ja? Ich habe ein MBP mit 10.4.7. Hallo, naja, nicht ganz so gut …. Gruss Andreas __________________ Powermac G5 Dual-Core 2.0GHz, Cinema Display 23", iBook G4 1GHz, iPod 4G 20GB "Wir sehen die Dinge nicht wie sie sind, sondern wie WIR sind …." […]

• 136. Paddy Hamilton  |  July 31st, 2006 at 07:39

  There’s an old adage in the medical profession: “IF THERE ARE A LOT OF REMEDIES ON THE MARKET, FOR A COMPLAINT, CHANCES ARE NONE OF THEM ARE ANY GOOD” - paraphrased from Hippocrates.

  All but SuperDuper! appear to be ’snake oil’.

• 137. bilbo--baggins  |  August 18th, 2006 at 20:34

  Chris Howard - you can retrieve files from Backup packages, after problems in the past I made sure I could do this manually before I decided to use it regularly.

  However, I do also use Deja Vu to backup to a different volume so that I’m not putting all of my eggs in one basket.

  Retrospect Express - came free with my WD My Book Pro. When I tried using it’s ‘configure DVD writer’ option it froze, and a forced quit completely crashed OS X (kernel panic I presume). I cannot trust software that crashes, particularly for such an important function as backup.

  I will be very interested to see how much Time Machine (announced feature of Leopard) solves these backup issues. In principle it sounds fantastic.

• 138. Agent  |  August 29th, 2006 at 11:20

  I’d really love it if you released your test script…

  That and a post on how well rdiff works would be excellent.

  Particiularly since rdiff can be used over ssh and could be used instead of rsync. Which is a mess.

• 139. Blogaholic: Getting thing&hellip  |  August 30th, 2006 at 08:55

  […] Diese Einschränkungen führten dazu, dass ich mich um eine zusätzliche Backup-Lösung bemüht habe. Nachdem ich in einem früheren Beitrag festgestellt habe, dass es nicht ganz einfach ist, Resource Forks und Metadaten unter OS X zu sichern, hat es mich umso mehr gefreut als ich rdiff-backup entdeckt habe. Damit ist es möglich, eine Datensicherung über SSH auf einen entfernten Server durchzuführen und auch wiederherzustellen. Auf dem entfernten Server muss dazu ebenfalls rdiff-backup installiert sein. Die Kommentare zu dieser Software klingen sehr viel versprechend: Scott Lamb | April 28th, 2006 at 04:12: […]

• 140. seki  |  September 5th, 2006 at 12:01

  How about rdiff-backup? http://www.nongnu.org/rdiff-backup/

  They also claim that it preserves all information.

• 141. Sandy Parker  |  September 8th, 2006 at 02:28

  Re: Mac’s own Backup. You do not need a .mac.com account to use this. It can be downloaded at: http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/backup.html and will back up to any external HD, to CD or DVD. I have used it regularly - but never having had the need to restore (! crossed fingers) - cannot comment on its reliability. Currently using 10.4.7 on a G4

• 142. PeterW  |  September 8th, 2006 at 12:19

  Can you tell me whether the recommendations you make apply to cloning/disk imaging as much as to backup please. I have been a regular user of Carbon Copy Cloner/ASR to create bootable clones up to 10.3.9, and haven’t hit any metadata-related snags(aliases weren’t included in the config). I now have to recommend a solution for others to use (in Tiger).

• 143. Tom  |  September 9th, 2006 at 06:30

  Has anyone here tried “LaCie Backup”, it came with my LaCie hardrive it seems quite good… Although I don’t know the technical specs much… It’s simple which is what I like. One disturbing fact is that a LaCie techy said not to use it over “SilverKeeper” I found that wierd…

• 144. Apfhex  |  September 17th, 2006 at 09:04

  Excellent resource. Has anyone tried arRsync? It’s a basic GUI front end to rsync, Tiger compatible, Universal Binary. Plus is has an irresistibly fun name.

  It’s easy to find a goood clone backup utility (SuperDuper!) but it’s much harder to find a good specific file/folder backup synching utility.

• 145. SuperDuper oder CCC? - Ap&hellip  |  September 17th, 2006 at 15:39

  […] permalink SuperDuper! sichert im Gegensatz zu den meisten anderen Programmen die Metadaten korrekt. ich bin ziemlich begeistert von dem Programm. Es sichert sehr schnell und kreiert eine bootfähige Partition auf dem Sicherungslaufwerk. Wenn das gesicherte Laufwerk ausfällt, kann man sofort von der Externen booten, ohne aufwändig neu zu installieren. In Zukunft könnte Time Machine in Leopard noch eine bessere Alternative sein. __________________ � �h, Mr. Tod, k�nnten Sie uns erkl�ren, warum wir alle gleichzeitig gestorben sind?! � � Die Lachsschaumspeise. � […]

• 146. humorlessbitch&hellip  |  September 18th, 2006 at 05:31

  Quelle Horror!…

  Mac Backup Software that is Harmful?

  How can zis be?

  Becozz eet eats opp all ze metadata?

  Let me give you my own personal take on that: …

• 147. SeeN  |  September 19th, 2006 at 11:47

  very good indeed! thx for bring us such a good article!

• 148. JimJ  |  October 7th, 2006 at 18:37

  Maurits:

  I have been reeding and rereading your articles and the subsequent discussion on Mac OS X metedata, cloning, and backup for two days now. Thanks for all the good work!

  I thought I saw you mention somewhere that you might provide your test setup (the “particularly mean set of files and folders” with various metedata, and the script to test the results), but now I can’t find the note where it was mentioned…

  Anyway, I think it would be great for you to publish that somehow. It could become a standard test for Mac copy/clone/archive/backup/restore software. Further, it might relieve you of some of the requests to test yet another package the rest of us never heard of before. You can just give them the test suite and say “test it yourself”.

  I for one would love to have the test suite to do some testing of my own, which I would be happy to report back to the discussion…

• 149. Robert Tynes  |  October 22nd, 2006 at 21:38

  Maurits,

  I don’t know if you are continuing to monitor these posts, but thanks for the informative article –espaecially regarding metadata preservation, which is obviously an important consideration. Have you had a chance to review Synk 6, since it was released. It seems that perhaps for those of us that need an easy user interface, that this program may be a good option, as it does preserve metadata files as well.

  You mention that there are better forums for comparing backup tools’ features or usability aspects. Where might those forums be found?

• 150. maurits  |  October 22nd, 2006 at 21:50

  yes, i do continue monitoring the comments.

  And I wish I’d already had the time to test Synk 6, as well as Chronosynch 3.3. These are on my list.

  Regarding more info on backup tools, Google is your friend :)

• 151. Robert Tynes  |  October 22nd, 2006 at 21:57

  Also, have you reviewed Retrospect’s latest release for intel iMacs RetrospectExpress 6.1 w/ update 6.1.8 xx? Or would you just say stay away from that for iMac intel users, too?

• 152. maurits  |  October 22nd, 2006 at 22:05

  Everything I’ve reviewed I’ve written about.

• 153. Ashley Aitken  |  October 24th, 2006 at 02:18

  Great work Maurits!

  If I understand it correctly you were testing whether each backup software preserves all the possible metadata associated with a file (as well as the data, of course). This is a very important starting point, which I would have hoped all the commercial backup software vendors would have had covered (within their testing). Unfortunately it seems that they didn’t, or at least weren’t open about the results. I think, perhaps, that some also thought by using Apple’s engine (ditto or the engine used by Disk Utility) that everything would be ok - shame on Apple for not making this the case.

  Of course, preserving metadata is only one (very important part) of backup. I am not suggesting that you test the others but users should be aware that features like cloning versus incremental backups are important too. Most users should know that they very probably need an incremental backup solution rather than just a clone (because, as others h