[Leica] Upgrading to Snow Leopard

[hartzell at alerce.com (George Hartzell)]

Henning Wulff writes:
 > Hi Nathan,
 > 
 > It's a good backup of your personal data, but not a good backup for 
 > this purpose.
 > 
 > You should have a cloned backup, [...]

Henning,

You've asserted that a Time Machine backup isn't a good general
purpose backup but you've never said why.

So, why isn't it a good general purpose backup?

I can rebuild my machine from it (minus the browser cache and some
other things that Apple considers unimportant....) from a Time Machine
backup, using Apple tested and supported programs and interfaces.

If you'd like to have an independent backup then:

  - plug an extra disk into the machine, use System Preferences ->
    Time Machine to point Time Machine at it
  - tell Time Machine to run a backup.
  - safely remove the drive (eject, etc...)
  - go back to System Preferences -> Time Machine and point it at your
    normal Time Machine backup device.
  - get pack to work.

What is wrong with using Time Machine as your backup and restore
machinery?

Do you not trust Time Machine?  If not, then why are you using it at
all?  Is it just a belt and suspenders thing?

I'm actually at least as paranoid as the next guy and have used Super
Duper and CCC backups in the past but don't do them any longer.  I do,
however, have multiple Time Machine backups for each computer
(regularly scheduled ones over the network to storage on either an
Infrant NAS or a Artigo a2000 running FreeNas and episodic ones to
external disks).

Is there something that I should be worried about?

This kind of reminds me of a conversation a while back that kind of
went "You should use RAID for your image storage because it makes it
safer, but don't use it for your system because it can't be trusted."
I never quite made sense of that either (yes, I use an Apple software
mirror as my system device in my Mac Pro).

Thanks,

g.