Consensus on best non-Retrospect backup solution?

[extensivegroup]

Hey Everyone,

Curious to know what, if any, folks in the Macosx.com world use to schedule backups that is non-Retrospect/Dantz? I'd heard that the scheduling function of Carbon Copy Cloner / RSyncX is actually broken under 10.4 and who knows when Mike will release CCC 3.0

For years I've used (and still use) a great little preference pane called Deja Vu that came free with Toast 6. It works easily enough at scheduling daily, weekly and monthly backups to any drive.

Just curious if anyone has any other neat/interesting solutions.

[perfessor101]

The best option depends on your backup plan. Tri-Backup or Data Backup offer the most options including versioned backups as well as data compression to conserve space on backup media. The various cloning apps such as CCC, SuperDuper, and others generally work well, but you lose the advantage of versioning and to my way of thinking that is a huge loss. You might take a look at my diatribe on Backup Strategies to see why I think that is such a loss.

FWIW I have used Tri-Backup since OS X 10.0, it was the first successful OS X backup application, and it has never let me down yet. Functionally Data Backup is very similar, but it uses a different driver engine.

[dmetzcher]

I love SuperDuper and use it to do weekly clone updates to a FireWire hard drive. The first time you run it, it will take about 1.25 hours per 24GB of data. Updates to the clone, going forward, will depend on how many things change on your hard drive, but they usually take me about 12-14 minutes.