Friday, June 12, 2009

SuperDuper "Smart Update" doesn't stay smart

I use SuperDuper for backups on my work machine (MacBook Pro), and I have it set up to backup daily to an external drive using "Smart Update", which is supposed to be fast and only copy things that have changed. I really have no idea how it works, nor do I care, as long as it's working.

The problem is that it has started to take longer and longer to run. It had reached the point where it was taking 2 hours or more to finish (my drive is 120G and I don't back all of it up). I found very little help by searching on Google, so I asked the Sysadmin, who also uses SuperDuper, if he had seen the same problem. He said "I don't know, I only do full backups once a week".

That made me think that maybe SuperDuper just doesn't handle backing up repeatedly using Smart Update only. So I revised my schedule to do a full backup once a week, and Smart Updates daily. Success! My daily backups are back down to 15 minutes or less! I thought I'd post this in case it helps someone else.