Appleinsider:
This is a showdown between four of the best backup utilities and there will be a winner. However, the winner isn’t going to be one of these, it’s going to be you. We’re not looking for app we can crown the best and walk away for a year, we’re looking for the very best app for you and exactly what you need to do.
Any of these would do the job —but there is one that is better at it for you than either of the others. That said, there is a different one that’s better for your friend, colleague, partner, spouse, or relative. Let AppleInsider save you time picking from one of these four.
I agree that Time Machine is the easiest backup to do and the one I recommend to people who don’t do other backups but I’ve been burned a couple of times with it so I also do backups with SuperDuper and Carbon Copy Cloner – both great apps.
I use CCC and TM but it’s important to note that they don’t necessarily do the same thing – if you want to browse back different versions of the same file, TM is likely the best/easiest. CCC can make that hard. On the other hand, CCC makes a bootable clone of your drive if you want and thus if your internal drive dies and you need to continue work right away until it can get replaced, you can use the CCC backup to do that.
And, of course, there’s offsite backup…
As an experienced MacAdmin I personally use SuperDuper, CrashPlan, and Time Machine. Local archival and clone backups plus a cloud backup gives me the best combination of speedy recovery plus catastrophic event coverage.
It’s what I recommend to all my freelance clients as well.
Agreed; the best is a combination of methods.
I’m not an experienced “MacAdmin,” but I use TM, CCC, Chronosync, and Backblaze.
😉
I use mainly Time Machine – but add “Backup Scheduler for TM” so it only backs up overnight (11pm-6am) and not bogging my machines down during the day.
I also have two TM drives on my desk so it alternates between them, and a third I keep offsite and bring in once a month or so.
Strange I don’t find anything simple about TM. To me it’s a really bad crutch that leads to bad habits and unexpected results. It’s extremley slow when needed to recover a complete system and gets in my way when I’m working. I learned a long time ago how to save documets when working and how to use “save as” for versioning. Too often I’ve had to reconfigure TM for clients and try to get them to keep track of disk space especially when network TM volumes are used. Last TM back-ups do not seem to survived migrations to new Macs.
As far as back-ups are concerned I use CCC with several disks and network volumes – internal which are configured for incremental back-ups as well as externals which are configured without. This all happens at preset schedules which can be chained together or run with actions. It evens runs when no one is logged on and can even mount network volumes. Last its easy as pie to activate manually.