super duper

Dana wants to know if he should reformat his iMac hard drive to make it run faster. Leo says often that's the best thing to do. Since Dave has a bootable image from Super Duper, he can do it and be back up in minutes. He should just boot from the image, then copy the image to his hard drive and he'll be back up. Sometimes it just takes a little spring cleaning. Better yet — he can get an SSD and use the hard drive as his data drive. His computer will be a lot faster with that.

Eric converted to High Sierra on his Mac and chose APFS on Time Machine. Now he's got trouble. Leo says that Apple cautioned not to do that. Can he at least downgrade? Leo says that the good news is there was no data lost, so he could format it to downgrade from APFS and then let it backup again. Eric should check out this article at macobserver on how to use Time Machine with APFS. He shouldn't convert to APFS if he has a Fusion drive just yet.

Chris says that his Time Machine won't let him set when the backup happens. It just does it when it wants to. Are there any alternatives? Leo says that SuperDuper is a better option. It can not only back up his internal drive, but it can make his external drive bootable so that if his hard drive dies, he'll be back up and running within minutes or even seconds!

Dale says that the Fuji X-T2 and he says that most adjustments can be made without the menu settings. They have dials and buttons like the old days. Leo says that seems to be the trend now, going back to physical dials to make changes while shooting, and you can even reassign and program buttons for your most often used settings. It's mostly in higher end cameras, though. Leo says that they look like the old retro style film cameras and he loves that.

Brian is a wedding videographer and he's noticed that Time Machine hasn't been backing up his footage for about a year. Leo says that the first thing Brian should do is stop using Apple's Time Machine. It's terrible and everyone knows it. Leo says that Brian should rethink his strategy because he's a professional and It's even more important that he doesn't lose data. Leo advises reading Peter Krogh's DAM Book. He can also go to DPBestflow.org. He should look under resources.

Leo says that a bootable backup is a good idea and almost every hard drive comes with disk cloning software in order to make an exact copy of the hard drive he would have. It'll even be bootable. The Chatroom recommends NeoSmart's EasyBCD. Seagate has one called DiscWizard. It's a free download that will clone his Seagate hard drive.

Adam is thinking of making an image of his hard drive using SuperDuper, then putting it on an external hard drive and boot from it on another computer. Leo says he can do it, but the problem is he'd be using the operating system from different hardware. It could actually work, though, so he can attempt it.

Jonathan is having trouble backing up his Mac. He backs up to one with Time Machine and one with Super Duper. He formatted his hard drive to do a clean install. When he plugs in his backup drive, will it sync and wipe out what he has? Leo says backups will never delete anything from the backup. It just adds to it. Then he can restore to his source drive for that very reason.

Connor just bought a new external hard drive, but he doesn't know what sync program to use for backup. Leo says that on the Mac, he could use ChronoSync or SuperDuper. On the PC side he could use Second Copy or FreeFile Sync.

Neil bought the Apple Watch to go along with his new MacBook Pro. He likes that he can pay for his Starbucks coffee with it via Apple Pay. Leo says that while that's cool, it really doesn't save much time because he'd still have to respond to all the prompts about cash back, charge or debit, etc. He may as well pay cash.