With SuperDuper! for OS X, you can back up, clone, restore, image files, and more. This amazing program is so easy to use that losing data can only produce extreme self-flagellation, if you lose them because you didn't have SuperDuper! And remember this profound truth: there are two types of people: those who have lost data, and those who will.

I am embarrassed to admit that I have never successfully used any backup program. I tried Retrospect and it was so complicated that I gave up. I tried the free .Mac Backup for members and gave that up, too. I back up manually; that means, when I think about it, I copy my iPhoto Library and my iTunes Library to an external hard drive. My Aperture photos have Vault, which is a built in backup system, but you have to remember to do it manually. Lately, I've been hearing a lot of my friends rave about SuperDuper and how easy it is to use. I had to try it.

SuperDuper is both easy to set up, and easy to understand, even for new computer users. Still, it has enough features to satisfy the advanced user, too. The first backup is long but the updates are a breeze. I put SuperDuper to the test and cloned my 250-GB SATA startup hard drive, which had 156.85 GB used. It took 2 hours and 10 minutes to copy 156.36 GB to my external SATA Wiebetech 250-GB hard drive via eSATA connection. Once that was done, it took 16 minutes and 43 seconds to update using the Smart Update feature.

To get started buy a large hard drive, the larger the better, that will be dedicated to holding your backed-up data, and managed by SuperDuper. You'll have to decide whether or not to partition it, depending on your personal needs. Partitioning a hard drive may help when using the Sandbox feature in SuperDuper. They recommend a 10-GB partition.

A SuperDuper feature called Sandbox allows you to first play with a new OS update to see if you are satisfied before you commit to it. Clone your OS to a second drive, boot from it, access all your apps from your primary drive. Try the update on the second drive and see if you like it before you commit. This is pretty cool.

I've never used SuperDuper before so I have not seen the different versions. In this version the developers claim the following changes:

• Can disable ACL copying in Advanced options
• The What's going to happen? section now says when the destination is an image
• No longer allows erroneous restarting/startup from an image
• Scheduling now works with multi-byte characters in volume names
• Scheduling now works under 10.3.x for Japanese language users
• Addressed various other minor issues

• The ability to easily schedule backups
• Additional imaging options
• More control over shutdown
• Better AppleScript support
• Hundreds of UI improvements
• Growl support
• And a completely rewritten, task-based User's Guide.

It is so refreshing to find a quality program that works so well and is so easy to use. This is the only backup program anyone needs.