Mac Leopard, iTunes, apple lossless best backup

If you haven't upgraded to Leopard there's a great $28 application called SuperDuper that makes backups simple and painless. It has a very intuitive interface and will do anything from incremental backups of a single folder to creating a bootable mirror image of your system drive. There's a free trial version available. I've been using it to back up to a pair of external drives and am very impressed with the ease of use and functionality.

Jdillard,

As changes are made to a file, Time Machine wants to keep multiple versions of the file so that you can go back in time to retrieve the old version. As you reorganize tracks in iTunes, iTunes will rename tracks and move tracks from folder to folder causing multiple copies of the same track being backed up by Time Machine. Also, any changes made to embedded meta data (artist, genre, track number, etc...) will cause multiple copies being backup as well. Obviously, this is not a very efficient way of using disk space.

What you really want is a program that will keep your primary iTunes library and the backup library completely in sync. If a file is deleted from primary, it should be deleted from backup. If a file is added to primary, it should be added to backup as well. In other words, you want the backup to be identical to the primary.

In the case the primary crashes, you want to be able to simply replace the primary with the backup (maybe with minor configuration change due to different volume names), restart iTunes and get back to business. You can't do that with Time Machine. With Time Machine, you must get a new drive and restore all your music files from the backup. It may take a whole day if you have 500G of music.

Well, personally I'm not concerned about how the program uses the disk space. What I mean is that I'd use a dedicated disk regardless, and I'd keep it filled with as many incremental backups as I could. So why not let TM do it for me? In fact, it's much more efficient than if I did it manually, since I would back up entire folders or drives as opposed to the individual files that have changed. So I essentially end up with more backups in a given volume. Plus, after 48 hours it converts the older hourly backups to single daily ones, then after 30 days, the dailies to monthlies.

Your other points I confess I don't really understand. The whole point of TM's journalling is that it is always in sync, and that you can easily restore a single file very quickly to any specific point in time. If I accidently delete all my playlists, for example, I just go to the iTunes folder, click TM, pick the point in time I want to go back to, highlight the file and click restore. The advantage, apart from ease, is that I can choose a backup from less than an hour ago rather than last night (or three weeks ago if I'm doing it manually). Of course, you can also do a complete restore from scratch if you need.

I can see someone being wary of using TM because its new; but as for how it works, I can't imagine a better solution.

Everyone, thanks for your input.

Sidssp, I last tried Silverkeeper about 2 years ago when I was back on 10.2.8 OS X. It didn't work so well. I'll have a look again.

Given that'll be somewhat a manual process, I know where my music files are kept -- on my external 500 GB drive.

But what about my user account files? Shall I just include the entire username directory in my backup? And that will preserve any metadata -- ratings info, lyrics, etc., in addition to album art?

Or should i just copy the Library directory w/in the user account area?

Thanks again.

Just an FYI, SuperDuper is not yet compatible with Leopard, though I suspect it will be soon.