So, yesterday, I decided to try out the DVD burning capabilities of my internal Superdrive in the new 12-inch. Unfortunately, I thought I’d be practical about it and make a DVD backup of some files from my old tower (which I will be putting up on auction on Wednesday if my friend, Erik passes on buying it). So first off, I downloaded and installed Apple’s Backup 2.0.1 from the .Mac site. Or at least I thought I did. I tried installing it three times with no effect whatsoever. I think having two drives with Application folders threw the installer for a loop (at least that is my theory). I should have taken the hint and stopped, but instead, I found an archived copy of the program from when it was installed on my other 12-inch, and simply copied that over to my Applications folder. Problem #1: Dumb installer. Now, I’ve used Backup to backup files to my iDisk in the past, so that functionality would seem to work fine. This time, however, I was archiving 11GBs of data on 3 DVDs. The entire process took about 3 hours and when it was done, I thought, Hey, let me pop one of these suckers in and check out how the backup went! This was only to discover that I had 3 useless DVDs of backup info, b/c they appear blank upon insertion in the Finder and you can only get at the data by rerunning Backup and selecting restore (which I would imagine would take 3 more hours). Very unhelpful. I even tried using the Terminal to see if I could navigate to the ‘invisible files’. Unfortunately, somewhere along the ls cd ls cd route I used to try to find my data, the long odd names that Backup uses to organize its archive freaked out Bash, which could no longer follow the path.
Overall, big waste of time and DVDs. If anybody at Apple reads this, I’d really like this product a LOT more, if the data burned to removable media were accessible from outside of the Backup program (so that it would not only be removable but also moveable). So, in any case, I’m shopping around for a good burn-to-DVD backup utility (I already have Carbon Copy Cloner for backing up my entire hard drive to a larger FW disk). Any recommendations?
UPDATE: Phillip points out: “| just read your item on using Back-Up with DVDs – I might be wrong, but when you use Back-Up with a HD, the file Back-Up creates is meant to be a package, which you can navigate through the contextual menu…” So, it would seem that Backup took my 11GBs of data and put it all in one file that it spread across 3 DVD disks. So I could most likely view the data if I would take the time to launch Backup and follow it’s navigation methods. Not necessary to go through an entire restore. Still, I’d rather have access from the Finder. For my purposes, it would be better if I simply manually copied the data over to blank DVDs. Maybe I can script this… Something to divide the files into
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