Mac Back Up

Background:

I'm new (again) to the Mac. I worked at Apple back in 1986-1992, as a logistics consultant. And years after leaving I continued to be a Mac head, however as the 1990's droned on, I merged back into the Windows world, primarily because all my clients had those machines (I relapsed, sorry).

But I just dove back into the Mac arena a week ago and couldn't feel more "at home". Anyways, to my question: Back Ups.

I want to create a back up that I could use to populate a new/replacement Mac, should my current Mac get lost, stolen, fried, damaged, you name it.

I envision a back up that would allow me to populate the new Mac with all my data (duh), AND installed software. Perhaps this back up can be booted from too?!?

Does such a beast exists, and if so, how do I do this?

Until I get such a solution, I just drag my data to an external HD, but this current solution does not save me from having to re-install all my software on a new/replacement future Mac.

My mac: MacBook Pro, 15", Retina, Mountain Lion, 768gb SSD, 16gig ram, about 300gb of data, and several legal softwares such as PhotoShop CS6, MS-Office suite, much more. What I want to do is create a one-stop refresh of my data and installed pgms, should that day come.

I hope I was clear enough but let me know if you need more info.

Thanks in advance

Get an external HD 2x larger than your current internal HD and then open Time Machine and point it to the new external HD and press Go.

Thanks Deckyon, but can I reboot from that Time Machine back up, should I need to? Does Time Machine back up my installed software and OS configuration too?

How would one go about using Time Machine to refresh an old Mac or populate a replacement Mac?

Thanks again!

TM backs up everything once, then incremental. Search on Time Machine for more in-depth information, I am not going to regurgitate what has been referenced many times.

Deckyon said:

TM backs up everything once, then incremental. Search on Time Machine for more in-depth information, I am not going to regurgitate what has been referenced many times.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the help....and the back handed response too. ;-)

didnt mean it to be backhanded. I just try and keep things short.

This site has a couple of very good articles on backing up your Mac.

Back It Up Part 1 | Mac-Forums Blog

and

Back It Up Part 2 | Mac-Forums Blog

I have used Carbon Copy Cloner and SuperDuper! with excellent results.

I currently use SuperDuper for all my on-site backups, and Backblaze for cloud backups.

Whatever software and/or service you decide to use keep in mind that one backup is better than none, but two backups are much better than one, especially if one of your backups is off-site.

LightCraftsMan, thanks for the info!!

I plan on a back up on two sets of HD's locally, and a 3rd set kept remotely.

I don't think you can boot a TM disk. I use Carbon Copy Cloner to do a full backup to an external drive. I schedule it to run each night at 1 am, leave the MBP on (It goes to sleep on its own) and let it rip. It even sends me an email telling me if it was successful and how much it copied. The first backup is everything, then incremental. I also use TM to keep multiples, also set to run once a day with Time Machine Editor (you can search for it). The TM only backs up my data files, not the OS, but CCC has everything. So, if all I need is data, TM is the choice, but if I need to boot from external to recover completely, I have the CCC disk.

Hope that helps some.

Time Machine is not bootable. Recommend SuperDuper. With the registered version you can simply do a weekly Smart Backup which only updates the clone to the current state and takes about three or four minutes and is bootable.

Everyone thanks for your help!!