super duper vs carbon copy cloner

Dave, I have used both SD and CCC. My vote comes down heavily on the side of SD. I have it as a download, but that has never proven to be a problem. I set it up to make scheduled backups, and a couple of years ago, when my iMac G5 was out for repair, I hooked my firewire external to an old G3 iMac I had lying around, booted from the clone, and was up and running in seconds. SD is completely reliable, I have reverse cloned from it and it worked perfectly then as well. In fact, I am delaying installing Leopard on my main iMac till SD is compatible, which the developer promises will be soon. He is very responsive to questions and emails, take a look at his site [shirtpocket.com].

What more can I say? It's a great application and I would never have a computer without it installed.

I think SuperDuper! is easier for every day use and for creating your backup plan.

Carbon Copy Cloner copies everything unless you implement "filter"s. Needless to say, these are not straight forward.

OS 10.5's Time Machine is even easier.

I would prefer having a CD/DVD in case something goes awry.

Well, why not use the downloaded disk image to burn a CD/DVD?

Duane, Time Machine may be easier for automated backups, but booting from it takes a lot of fiddling around. With SD, just plug it in and go!

I haven't had the "opportunity" to recover from a complete system failure with a Time Machine backup. But old file retrieval is extremely easy and intuitive with Time Machine.

Booting from a SuperDuper! or Carbon Copy Cloner clone is certainly easy.

I haven't had the "opportunity" to recover from a complete system failure with a Time Machine backup

I hope you never do...

You can do that. You will then have a CD with one file on it... that disk image.

Or you can use Disk Utility to burn the CD so that it is an image from the disk image.

Me too... 🙂

David:

I have never used Super Duper although I'm sure it is a fine product. I have been a long time user of Carbon Copy Cloner and have been very happy with it. The latest version (3.0) has a new interface which, IMO, is a big improvement over the older version.

I only use CCC to make a clone of my hard drive so I am not really concerned about configuring special backups and I like the fact that you just install it and go.

I have had a couple of instances where I needed to use my clone and it was up and running in seconds. Also, the latest version of CCC is fully compatible with Leopard. SD currently says "preliminarily compatible". I don't think you can go wrong with either product.

As far as the download goes, as others have said, just burn the disk image onto a disk for archive purposes.

Hope this helps.


David