Tag Archives: superduper

Send in the clones!

So here’s the thing that drives me crazy.

Having had a hard disk die on me a few years ago, I’m a little paranoid about backups. I have three:

  1. Time Machine, over WiFi to a Synology NAS
  2. Backblaze, “cloud” backup over the internet
  3. SuperDuper clone to an infrequently connected USB hard disk

Time Machine and Backblaze run all the time, nice, seamless and hopefully pretty complete. I do the SuperDuper clone occasionally and every few months I try to reboot and check that the clone actually works.

And that’s where the problems start.

If I forget to turn off WiFi — which I almost always do — then when the clone starts up, it immediately connects to WiFi and starts to back up to Time Machine. I panic and stop it as soon as I realise.

But then I boot back to my main disk and… Time Machine decides it needs to do a full backup. Which. Takes. Forever. (Backblaze is also doing a huge backup, presumably for the same reason.)

What’s the answer to this? Is there a way to switch off WiFi on the clone automatically? Only start when the boot disk has a specific name? I don’t know! It’s hard to search for because I can’t think what the answer might be.