Re: Best way to do a HD "back up"?

In article <1h8cq3m.3f0jopoz8fr7N%me2@xxxxxxxxxxx>, The Rev Gaston
<me2@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Considering the price of external HDs, and the hassle if something goes
> wrong, I just don't see the point of not keeping a clone of your HD on
> an external drive.
>
> I personally use SuperDuper for that purpose, and find it excellent.

Hmm. In my view, that solves about 1% of all reasons for needing to
restore something. ... ...unless you can afford a new firewire disk
every day or so.

By far the greatest job that a good backup can do is recover from an
accidental over-write or deletion of a single file or small groups of
files. The next is to provide an audit trail.
As I get older and grumpier, the more convinced I become that the
concept of a file is an imperfect match with what is really needed.

I have never found a perfect backup mechanism for guarding against
accidents and misjudgements as well as hardware catastrophes, fire and
theft. I settle for daily incrementals and weekly semi-fulls with
alternating off-site storage. If I could manage the incrementals
elegantly I could restore the state of any of my work on any given day
going back years. How I wish!

Chronosync is almost there, but to do it properly you need the machine
in a quiescent state for some time. What I have been doing is brutally
slamming ~/Documents and ~/Library to an external disk, then backing up
from there at leisure.
I'd like to see something like the ill-fated Spiralog[1] automatically
backing up every disk write as it happens, so I'd never need to to stop
for backup ever again.

1 A VMS file system development that was canned before it saw the light
of day. If journalling were done right, it could come close, but its a
big ask.

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