Via Shirt Pocket Watch (the blog of the makers of SuperDuper!): two posts about backups on Mac OS X; the first primarily a description of the problems encountered (mainly preserving metadata) and the second a practical comparison of how actual tools performed — with devastating results.

The surprising conclusion is that almost all Macintosh backup or cloning programs do not fulfill their primary purpose, i.e., they are not able to restore files with all associated metadata. This is despite the fact that many of the tools are advertised as “safe”, “accurate”, “bug-free”, etc. The tools that fail are harmful because they generate a false sense of security. Even more exasperating is that many of these tools cost (significant amounts of) money. The only laudable exception is the great SuperDuper application, which performs flawlessly.

And:

One result that I found extremely surprising is the poor performance of the venerable Retrospect.

It seems that, while once (in the days of Mac OS 7) a highly-recommendable backup solution, Retrospect did an extremely poor job — despite still having a high reputation. Sure, Mac OS X is a wholly different beast, but it’s been out of beta for over five years now, so you’d think even backup software developers have caught on to its perks and quirks.

I’m also surprised to see Carbon Copy Cloner listed as not recommended, but the reasoning is good: doesn’t preserve BSD flags, locked flag, creation date, HFS+ extended attributes, ACLs [uses ditto]. Of course, that’s still better than the avoid at all cost tools such as Retrospect.

Guess I shall go buy SuperDuper! once I have my MacBook Pro. Not the today-released 17-inch one, by the way, thankyouverymuch.