WD Smartware v. Apple Time Machine

FrankieCrabs

FrankieCrabs

Joined
Nov 28, 2000
Messages
524
Hey, all.
I just got a portable backup hard drive, a Western Digital My Passport SE for Mac. It comes with some WD backup software called Smartware. I was wondering, before I started to get involved with starting a backup, is the WD software better than the Apple Time Machine sw on my Macbook Pro? Or, are they so similar that it makes no difference which I use? :confused:

TIA,
Frank
 
I'd think someone would need to use both softwares to really compare them to give you a complete answer

For what it's worth, I just "Retrieved" data from my Western Digital Passport drive. I can tell you it does copy my Music, Videos and Desktop files and it was less than a pain to use it
 
Time Machine is really easy to use but is best when always attached to the computer. You might want to check out SuperDuper. It's free and it makes a complete clone of your drive.
 
Partition your external into two equal sized partition, one for Time Machine and one for Carbon Copy Cloner so you can have a bootable drive if need be.

Then you have the simplicity of time machine for back ups, and have CCC as a bootable drive and a secondary back up. Time Machine is easier but CCC has it's advantages so I use both.

You can use disk utility to partition out the drive.
 
Bootcamp's incremental backups are more useful for end users. The incremental backups allow rolling back with a high degree of control. I've used ccc and time machine- indent trust time machine on any of the 10.5 10.6 servers that I admin due to occasional bouts of sparseimage corruption. I wouldn't partition a drive to share ccc and time machine; an invalid partition map would hose both. For an end user, time machine often makes more sense because worst-case you can import the time machine data Ito a clean is, but I've had ccc backups that are of no use because corrupt/damaged data already replicated to the backup drive, and without incremental versioning there was noneasy way to roll back. On servers I use a combination of rsync and retrospect, on my computer it's time machine and mozy, for incremental offsite storage.
 
Thanks, folks. I think it'll be time machine, too, based upon suggestions here and some googling of the topic.

F.
 
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