[studley]

I'm trying to find some user friendly freeware for my ibook that will backup my music files to a second HDD.  The ones I've found so far seem to first replicate all the data  as part of the process.  If I've understood this correctly this would seem to mean that my back up storage capacity is limited to half the capacity of the back up HDD.  No damn good at all.

Can anybody recommend any freeware that doesn't have this drawback?  (Or have I got this wrong?)

[jakepunk]

You're right that Carbon Copy Cloner and SuperDuper are designed to copy whole volumes.  CCC has the ability to de-select components it copies, though.  You could deselect everything except the "Users" component and merely copy your home directory.  That would exclude the system files and applications.  I would consider backing up the other stuff in your home directory a bonus.

You could always drag and drop the Music folder to the second drive and not use any software to copy.  You would have to delete the data from the second drive before copying since there would be no intelligence to sync between the two.  I find this option scary because if your original drive decides to fail just then, you don't have a backup.

I use CCC to copy my entire disk.  You can even boot from the external disk if your internal drive ever goes belly up.  Hard disk space is relatively cheap, so I like the peace of mind of having the entire volume cloned.

[davehg]

I use this software (v. 1.1.4) which came with my LaCie Mini drives (I use 2 250gb drives, one backs up the other, but just the folders I tell it to). When I power up, the software automatically checks the files and copies any new ones. Works well.

http://www.lacie.com/silverkeeper/

[studley]

Thanks for the recommendations guys.


davehg - I had thought that Silverkeeper suffered from the drawback I ineptly described in my original post.  Let me have another go at explaining what may be a misapprehension on my part.  I thought that a number of these programs use an updating  process  that involves replicating the entire database you are copying, in addition to any existing copy, and then deleting all the duplicate copies.  Hence, if your back-up HDD is 250 GB, you can only back-up a maximum 125GB of data because the software needs to use  the other 125GB in the backing-up process.   Is this true of Silverlkeeper?  (I'm guessing not as your back-up HDD is the same size as your original HDD.)

[studley]

OK this is what's puzzling me.  This is from the Silverkeeper Q&A info:

Q: How much free space do I need on the Destination when using SilverKeeper?
A: You should have at minimum at least 2X the size of the largest folder on your Source.
This is because SilverKeeper makes a complete copy of each folder on the Source,
before eliminating the previous Backup that was made.
Q: Does SilverKeeper do incremental backups?
A: What SilverKeeper actually does is a mirror operation. The end result is that the
Destination will be a duplicate of the Source after the Backup operation completes.
 
To save copying time, SilverKeeper will only copy the changed or newer files, and
reuse previously copied files from previous backups.




This seems to contradict itself??

[Levi]

Enjoy the Silverkeeper.  You get what you pay for when it comes to software.