Mac: SuperDuper! lives up to its name
When I heard the name, I thought it was cheesy, but because the blogosphere is of praise for this Mac utility, I procured SuperDuper! and cloned a 1TB Western Digital Studio of ‘re-directed’ iTunes data to a 1TB Western Digital Home gifted by my brother Alex, who insisted the library be backed up.
‘Re-directed’ data in a external is void of Coverflows and Metadata, hence I figured cloning, rather than backing up via Time Machine was an expedient, if not the only route to data recovery, given the marriage between raw data in an external and metadata in the internal is unique in the way iTunes is structured.
Recently, I accidentally erased the Studio. I fainted when 696 gigabytes vanished before my eyes. It was negligence on my part clicking the icon on Disk Utility when attempting to erase another drive. I never thought I would have to call up the clone for insurance.
To address the issue, I re-erased the Studio, re-named it exactly as it is named in the Change Location window on iTunes Preferences, attached the clone, launched SuperDuper! and began restoration.
7 hours later, the external was back to status quo, save for a few days of unbacked data. Close shave, that was! I have now scheduled the utility for weekly updates, depicted above. Click on the images for a larger view.
Just when I told myself that SuperDuper! is the best disaster recovery tool for iTunes libraries, the blogosphere is swearing by Carbon Copy Cloner, another Mac utility. Users who experienced either or both, please weigh in.
Moral of the story is, while the Mac is touted as crash-proof, a disaster-recovery tool is a bridge between its platform and negligent users.
Cheers, Tommy Peters
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