MacDaddy Mac Backup Guru — bootable cloning software for Apple Mac computers — a review

© 2016 Peter Free

20 July 2016 (updated 15 December 2016)

 

Update — 15 December 2016

What follows was written in July 2016.

MacDaddy has since much improved its previously unhelpful webpage. The new page gives instructions for uninstalling Guru.

I have provided the new links where appropriate in the below (July) text.

I credit Felix Andriessens (Sound Design) in Germany for tipping me off to MacDaddy's subsequent documentation improvements. He had struggled (in December) with the same Guru performance issues that I experienced in July.

The overall disappointed conclusion that I came to in July evidently still holds in December 2016.

 

Annoyingly over-simplified interface, absent manual, and surprisingly irritating in use

One can carry simplicity too far. That is what MacDaddy arguably did with Mac Backup Guru.

I made the mistake of buying this bootable clone software (for Apple Mac computers) based on Tom Nelson’s favorable online review:

 

Installation is as simple as dragging the downloaded app to your /Applications folder. Once you launch the app, Mac Backup Guru presents itself as a single-window app, with all of its controls and features presented within the window.

You start by selecting a source, which can be a volume or a folder, and a destination. If creating a clone, be sure to select just a volume. Otherwise, you can select a folder on a volume as the destination.

Below the source and destination are the options that affect the current backup; chief among these are a Synchronized Clone, and a Backup with Incremental Snapshots. You can also exclude items in the source from being copied to the destination.

You may not always see all the options, depending on the type of backup you’re performing. This is especially true when performing the very first backup clone, which by necessity lacks any sync or incremental options, although you can still exclude items.

Performance was average when creating an initial clone, but subsequent backups to the same clone, using either the synchronize or incremental options, was remarkably fast. This is especially true of the Backup with Incremental Snapshots option.

[I]s lack of a real user manual being its biggest fault. However, Mac Backup Guru is very easy to use, and the ability to create Backups with Incremental Snapshots that are fully bootable brings new capabilities to Mac backup apps; for this reason, the cons I cite aren’t that important compared to what this app is capable of doing.

© 2015 Tom Nelson, Mac Backup Guru: Tom’s Mac Software Pick, macs.about.com (20 June 2015) (extracts)

 

The good part is true at first. After that, problems arose.

These irritations became so time-consuming that I had to uninstall the application. That process proved to be similar to getting rid of malware.

 

Details

The initial cloning went smoothly, even delightfully. However the next day, I began to notice a degree of unnecessary “clunk” into the incremental cloning process.

Every time that Guru wanted to do something, I had to sign into my iMac administratively. At several instances each day, this quickly became annoying. For some reason, I could not give the software permanent permission to do what it does.

I also discovered that Guru would not reliably add, nor dependably drop, incremental backup times from its schedule of tasks.

When I tried to change an incremental backup time of day, Guru sometimes lost the change. When I successfully re-added a new time, it curiously refused to drop the original one.

As a result of this glitch, the software began running twice a day. Naturally, the number of administrative sign-ins doubled. I could not find a way to permanently fix either problem.

There were also minor annoyances with the pattern of folders that Guru leaves on the external drive. Instead of compiling its bootable clone into an identifiable backup folder, Guru — at least in default mode — just dumps whatever comes from the iMac into an array of apparently cloned source folders. These mingle with whatever else gets put on the external drive.

 

Complete lack of useful documentation — as of the July 2016 review

If it was ignorance or stupidity on my part that caused these problems, an instruction manual would have helped.

MacDaddy‘s website is (was) unhelpfully useless. Even for so simple a thing as how to get rid of the program.

Guru is also new enough on the market, or perhaps not widely sold, that searching the Internet with specific “how to do” questions does no good.

 

Update — 15 December 2016

MacDaddy's new webpage is much more helpful.

A user guide is here.

MacDaddy's improved webpage now also tells you how to get rid of the application:

 

How can I uninstall Mac Backup Guru?

Simply by going into System Preferences -> Extensions and disabling it, then dragging the application to the trash. It is self-contained, even the daemon and extension are in the app bundle.

 

As a result, new users will not have to poke around, as I did, in the next section. (Which was written in July 2016)

 

Insult to injury — uninstalling Guru proved to be a pain in July 2016

Mac applications, unlike Windows, generally do not come with uninstallers built in. But usually you can drag an application to the trash or use the “move to trash” command to get rid of it. Of course, this requires finding the application first.

Applications appear in Finder, as well as on Launchpad. But not so with Guru, which did a pretty good job of emulating malware in its attempt to stay out of sight.

Not finding the MacDaddy software anywhere, I used Apple’s Spotlight search function. Unlike Windows, which tells you where the found item actually is in the system, Spotlight only allowed me to open Guru. Which was obviously not what I wanted.

In sum, Spotlight was of no help in telling me where to find Guru’s inadvertently malevolent brain and figuratively strangle it.

In poking around, I eventually discovered that Guru was operating as a System extension. On Macs, you cannot trash extensions from Finder, even when you can see them sitting there.

It took me a while to figure out how to quit Guru, which apparently is always on (from the System’s perspective), through the iMac’s System folder. Only after turning it completely off, could I send it to the dumpster from the System folder. (Quitting Guru in the Mac’s Dock did not work.)

Even when Guru was supposedly trashed, it was not immediately obvious that it was really gone. I had to wait until the next day’s incremental backup times to be sure MacDaddy’s irritating software had been eliminated from my computer world.

$29 wasted.

 

The moral? — I still cannot recommend Mac Backup Guru

Guru’s irritating performance glitches remain, according to a more recent user than I, even in December 2016.

However, MacDaddy has helpfully provided a new user guide, as well as uninstallation instructions. This is a welcome advance in documentation over my initial July 2016 review.

These documentation improvements suggest that Guru's software designer is favorably reacting to feedback from customers.

At the moment, however, I am using Bombich Software‘s Carbon Copy Cloner.  It is a joy in comparison to Backup Guru's erratically annoying cloning performance, even as of the end of 2016.

The other lesson to this is to beware Internet reviews by people who either (a) know way more than you do, or (b) who have not used the product long enough to be sure that it reliably and conveniently does what it says it does.