Carbon Copy Cloner versus Time Machine

Which one should i be using for a complete backup?

I need to partition using bootcamp but i need to backup first. Last thing i want to do is lose over 100gb of music films etc

Depends on what you want from a backup.

If you feel the need to be able to go back in time to retrieve previous versions of files or previously deleted files, TM is the way to go.

If you want a bootable duplicate of your internal drive, SD! or CCC is the way to go.

Time machine will back-up your files, applications and settings. You cannot boot from a TM back-up since the OS is not copied over, but you can restore your system after a fresh install or hard disk failure

Carbon Copy Cloner will do a complete copy of your hard drive that is bootable. You can then use the cloned image to restore everything back including the OS

And of course, its always a good idea to keep a back-up, as I learned last week when my hard drive failed (I had a TM back-up)

If you can .... do both

SuperDuper! or Carbon Copy Cloner make a bootable snapshot of your machine at a given moment in time.

Time Machine complements this by taking a copy of modified files every hour ( by default ) so you can have multiple copies of the same file on a TM backup and you can travel back in time to find the correct version of a file.

Also TM can work completely unattended with a Time Capsule, whilst you have to explicitly launch SuperDuper! or CCC so TM is very convenient to have.

However, if you need to do a complete system restore, your CCC bootable backup will be the quickest solution.

There are different backup strategies and my suggestion is to take a step back and decide what you want to protect yourself against, how quickly you want to be back in business again after a failure and how much effort you are willing to invest to re-create lost or corrupted data.
Once you have this figured out, then technology can step in and do the work for you.;D

Cheers ... McBie

SuperDuper can be scheduled to do backups;


Click for full size

Collin Bl said:

SuperDuper can be scheduled to do backups;


Click for full size

Click to expand...

Collin, where did you get that screen from ?
Is that behind the " Schedule " button on the main screen ?
Must admit I did not spot that before.
Thanks

Cheers ... McBie

From my copy but it is not selectable unless you have HD connected and yes, then clicking on schedule gets u in there.

SuperDuper is the way to go. The registered version is super fast however you can use it without registration.

I would recommend SuperDuper! as well. When Leopard was released, the authors of SD! spent quite a bit of time working to ensure that all of the nuisances of Leopard's updated filesystem were supported, as well as ensuring Time Machine compatibility. In that time, I don't remember CCC being similarly updated.

Current versions of SuperDuper and Carbon Copy Cloner are very similar. SD requires registration before it's full functional whereas CCC is fully functional since it's donation ware. As a point of interest... MacWorld rates CCC one half star higher than SD. I have no idea why. Perhaps the personal choice of the rater.

Regards.