Time machine by itself or with superduper

Question

I am anticipating the arrival of a package from Amazon containing something very special to me (sounding cheesy enough yet?) and am starting to prepare for upgrading to Leopard. I have already purchased a Western Digital MyBook Premium Edition 500GB hard drive for use with Time Machine. Since I am planning on doing an Archive and Install, I have used Carbon Copy Cloner to create a boot-able backup of my hard disk. All is well. SuperDuper would be really nice to have...it takes three hours to update my backup with Carbon Copy Cloner. Don't need to copy over all my Applications and old files twice...once will do it!
My question is should I invest in SuperDuper and continue to make boot-able backups once Leopard is installed and I am using Time Machine? How hard is it to restore your entire hard disk from a Time Machine backup? (I heard there is an option in Migration Assistant...is this true?) I had never made a boot-able backup until a few days ago and was wondering if they are worth the disk space, time, and money (if by SuperDuper...seems like its worth it over Carbon Copy Cloner). Hope to get Leopard soon (should have paid for shipping instead of USPS. I ordered my external hard driver from jr.com last Sunday evening and had it on Wednesday for $6 shipping.) In case you haven't picked up on it, I'm really wondering on the need to keep a boot-able backup. I'll stop repeating myself now. thanks for your help!

Answer 1

Adam --
I posted this a few days ago; it may give you perspective re your query. I am reasonably paranoid re back-up, as you will conclude when you read the appended comments.
"I have a slightly different approach: I use SuperDuper! (not yet Leopard-compatible, so updating my Tiger clone is delayed) to clone back up the internal drive (now with a single partition as I had to remove the TechTool Pro e-Drive - when I updated to Leopard - that I had previously created) in my MBP. The destination drive for the clone is a 500GB external drive (GUID partition scheme and therefore bootable) with three same-size partitions. I expect to automate the clone back ups (daily, using Smart Update) plus, once per week, copy the clone to one or the other (alternating sequence) of the two other volumes on that drive. In addition, I have a 750GB external drive that is the destination drive for TM. Finally, once per month, I will copy/replace BOTH the clone AND the TM back up to one of the two 1 TB TeraStations that are NAS on my network.
"The theory here, anyway, is that TM will give me a straightforward way to deal with file recovery and the SuperDuper! clone will give me a bootable system on a physically separate HD in case of catastrophic internal drive failure. The internal drive, the clone and the TM back-up are all physically separate. My TeraStations are backed up by the network's automated tape back-up system.
"I'm still thinking about the best way to back up my library of media files when they're migrated from their current external (to an IBM PC) NTFS volume to a direct-attached 2TB LaCie that I'm setting up for my MBP. I've been backing up these files directly to a TeraStation on the network. TM may be an interesting intermediate step -- automatic and more frequent than my current approach..."
The topic is available at:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1213189
I can say this: if your TM external HD/volume is not backed up to a network drive or tape system or you do not periodically do DVD backups on, say, a Blu-Ray Disk, then having a second backup image of your Macintosh HD/boot volume is a great way to avoid catastrophe.
Message was edited by: Pioneer