superduper!
As computers are wont to do, my PB 17″ has developed a glitch – a single pixel wide, consistently on column about .5 inches from the left of the screen. Unfortunately, this one means that I have to send it back to apple to fix. That means 5-10 business days without my main access to work, entertainment, and creative outlet. Crap. So, first step is to backup the computer, right? Well, being a UNIX geek, my first thought was “I’ll just rsync the whole thing and be done with it.” Then I started to look at / and realized that this is not so easy a thing. Sure I could do the whole computer, but then what? How do I get it back if/when I have to recover from it. Single files would be good, even directories would be good, but what about the whole thing? I mean the entire drive? How do I make a bootable copy? Well – superduper! is the answer. Not only does this tool do a superb job of copying everything, it knows how to do it without breaking the mac interface. It makes even old UNIX storage guys like me smile. Can’t recommend this highly enough.