Super Duper Imac
Despite all the new security warnings , patches and updates, coupled with my own personal prejudices regarding anything remotely PC related, I finally broke down and ordered myself a refurbished IMAC with the Intel Duo Core, and 3 gigs of ram from 18004memory. I’m happy to say that, there is no longer the need to have to pop the back off the IMAC to add ram, unlike the G5 IMacs of the past. As a precaution, I backed up my old EMAC’s drive to an external HD using a great utility called Super Duper . Not only does this highly competent and inexpensive shareware utility backup your hard drive, it will also create a bootable backup so you will never, ever, be at the complete mercy of your local geek with a business card, charging you boat-loads of money to recover lost data because your mac won’t boot and you NEED your data.
That screen is self-explanatory.
The options will include the option for creating a "bootable" backup. For me, that bootable backup is the most SIGNIFICANT aspect of Super Duper. My old boss (a nice enough tyrant when appeased but prone to emotional explosions when crossed) went out and spent a gazillion dollars for Dantz (now owned by EMC) Retrospect. I didn’t argue but, even though we backed up our computers EVERY DAY to a rotating series of external hard drives, I was never truly sure if we had a complete backup.
I once tried to test the result of the backup. The file was something only Retrospect could read – reinstall – or whatever the heck it did. She got mad at me for not "getting" what Retrospect did. I asked her to explain it to me , at which point she called Tech Support. She spent countless hours harassing tech support and still, I could never get a true handle on what we had accomplished each night during the backup process, but if it made Cristina feel better, hey, not my chicken.
To be clear- I have nothing against Retrospect, it may in fact be the best backup utility on the market, but it violates the first two of MadBadCat’s Rules of Software:
- Rule No. 1: I shouldn’t have to read the manual to figure out what the software does.
- Rule No. 2: I should know what I am getting when I use said software.
The unregistered version of Super Duper will happily back up your hard drive on demand and create a bootable backup as well. To get the great bonus features like scheduling, Smart Update (which saves a lot of time), Sandboxes, scripting and more, send the developers $27.95 via their website. It’s worth the money. IMHO, its worth more money than Retrospect.
Oh yeah- I should mention – Installing RAM in the iMac Intel Duo Core? So easy a caveman can do it. http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=303084
