Restoring OSX, backups are great

well my mac pro was running happily since january 2008 on a raid 10 configuration without any major issues. Sure it forgot it's keyboard from time to time and once a week I have to recharge all batteries. But otherwise it was the most reliable pc I ever had.

The wonderful timemachine software also did it's best to keep my backups up to date. So I never worried about a thing.

Till 2 harddrives started to report read/write errors 2 weeks ago. So I ordered a couple of new harddrives (500Gb x 4, I need speed and not space on this thing, and they are supposed to be nearly as fast as velicio raptors) To replace them.
At the time I noticed that I need more speed and 200mb/s write speed is just not fast enough for my stuff. So I decided to replace all 4 old harddrives with the 4 new ones in a raid 0 configuration.

I like to live risky? Sure, but I got backup's and timemachine is a great piece of software to restore a system...

Ok the idea was nice, but it turned out that you have to boot from the original osx cd to get timemachine to restore the complete system.

So plan B was on the table, let's call superduper to the rescue and use timemachine only for archiving my data.

Basically superduper generates a complete image of my system on an external harddrive and if my system fails, I can boot this HDD, keep working, while my system restores in the background.

And it only cost 27$ and makes live so much easier for me.

My new backup plan?

• hourly timemachine archives
• weekly super duper images