Leopard Time Machine & SuperDuper!

I thought that my recent purchase of SuperDuper was in vain now that Time Machine comes built into Leopard. Well, the thing is I tried to use Time Machine in the previous days, and it was painfully slow compared to the smart copy/update function of SuperDuper! I have cca. 50 gigs of data to back up from my macbook pro (all my works, the OS, some movies, some mp3s that’s it, and approximately 2 gigs of installed apps) and although I did not count but I have launched Time Machine twice in 2 days and it still did not finish my first backup of that 50 gigs. Then I thought it is enough. I stopped, switched off the stupid thing, and launched SuperDuper! an hour ago. I have my 200 gigs USB2 external drive plugged in, it copies roughly at 10 Mbytes/sec - and it already finsihed copying 40 gigs of data in a relatively short time.

I think I will back off of Time machine for a while. It needs some updates. Furthermore whilst you can boot up using a firewire / usb2? (it did not work for me. anyone can help? is it possible to boot an intel macbook pro using an external usb2 hard drive at all?) With time machine you can not boot up using the external backup drive - but using the OS X Leopard install dvd you can restore the backup as you like. I imagine that taking a tad bit longer than booting up straight from your backup drive.

These are my first experiences with the OS. Furthermore - even though I like it much - it seems to be having some problems using the latest 7.4.something iTunes playing mp3s. Taking up closely 40% of the CPU? For fucking mp3s? Oh my gosh! Something must be wrong here. Also the sound stutters (if that’s the right word for this). It stops then restarts leaving bad-bad empty areas. Sometimes. Sometimes not. Interesting. Also the latest parallels desktop is having some problems on Leopard. If you do not launch it first when right after your machine has booted up - then you might have a strange error message coming up at times - and if you are persistent enough to keep launching parallels again and again, it will reward you with a nice ‘machine has stopped responding’ screen. Nice enough. I will never again rush into upgrading my OS. Not even on the Mac. I have learned it on the Windows platform, but the same/similar things seem to be happening with Mac OS X as well.

Take care all of you,
Csaba