Review: Paragon Volume Snapshot for Mac OS X
- Article 85 of 89
- MacFormat, July 2010
An attempt to fill in the blanks in iCal’s feature set that doesn’t quite work
It’s a rare person who doesn’t use Time Machine or other backup software. However, in the event of a full hard drive crash, getting up and running using Time Machine can be time consuming – you’ll need to restore OS X first, then use Time Machine to restore the rest, since Time Machine can’t access system and other files in use during backups. Alternative back-up programs, such as Carbon Copy Cloner, can create copies of your entire hard drive, but require that you boot up off another drive or quit all applications while you’re running them.
Paragon’s Volume Snapshot for OS X claims to be the first Mac software that uses snapshot technology to create a fully bootable image of your hard drive, even when you’re running applications and software. It will create a snapshot of each file on your hard drive and copy that to a .dmg file that your system recovery DVD can use to restore your drive. It also claims it can do so at up to 1GB/minute.
Our first experience with Volume Snapshot wasn’t pretty: the installer hard-froze OS X. However, once installed, it’s very simple to use and created a bootable image of the hard drive. The 1GB/minute speed advertised was nothing like what we got – it took two hours to create a 42GB backup of 60GB of data.
But that’s it. It doesn’t have any scheduling or incremental backup functions, versioning or any of the other facilities of Time Machine and most other tools. Given the facilities available in other, cheaper tools, particularly SuperDuper!, this shouldn’t really be a first choice for backups.