Time Machine Alternatives

I think it's time for me to find an alternative to Time Machine. I had a lot of trouble with it initially and performed an erase and install on a drive only to find that the TM backup I was going to restore from had become corrupted. I recovered from that and had no problems with it for 6 months, where it was backing everything up properly, I could restore files with no problem and I had several months of backups. I then discovered the other day that once again the backup files have somehow become corrupted and are unusable. I'm ready to move on now. I'd like to hear some suggestions for commercial and/or shareware/freeware backup solutions to use as an alternative.

Powerbook G4, Mac OS X (10.5.1), 1.25 GHZ, 1GB Ram

Posted on Aug 5, 2008 10:41 AM

17 replies

farshid

Level 1

0 points

Aug 6, 2008 10:41 AM in response to George Krompacky

I agree with George, and this is the solution I am gravitating towards. I like TM's running in the background and keeping me covered, but for that night before the deadline when my hard drive crashes, I want something to continue working off of and minimize my downtime and helplessness. (this happened to me). So I would like to get a FW portable drive (anybody recommmend a model? I am looking at Lacie and Verbatim..) and run SD in addition to TM. In fact, I was thinking another option is to just get another SATA internal HD, a portable FW enclosure, and use that for SD, and when the hard drive crashes just swap the two at a good breakpoint in my work. Anybody have experience with this?

Also, it would be really helpful if I could TM backup to different backup disks, since I believe it is good to have several backups in different places. Is this possible?

nerowolfe

Level 6

13,090 points

Aug 6, 2008 12:08 PM in response to B. Bruce Brinson

B. Bruce Brinson wrote:
Thanks for the pointers - useful information. Of course, I didn't indicate I use a dmg as my only backup, just an extra archive to have lying around. Mostly I use Backup, and still have TM running, though I'm considering turning it off since it's such a resource hog.

On my system, TM runs once an hour for a few minutes. I just looked in the Activity Monitor and it does not appear at all. It seems that it's only using the system when backing up, so how can it be a resource hog?
Right now, the biggest system user is Safari with about 10% CPU.
If TM is a system resource hog on your computer, something is wrong.

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Time Machine Alternatives