etresoft wrote:
You could also use Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper!, but that would require a additional steps in order to create yet another backup of your system and would be more complicated to restore. I'm not sure, but using either of these to restore could require you to delete your existing backups. I don't use either of these programs, so don't quote me on that.
There should be nothing wrong with the CCC or SD alternative. It all depends on where you store the backup files. If you point CCC or SD at any volume already containing files, then the existing files will be wiped out. But if you want to use your one backup drive because there's still more than enough extra space on it, no problem. Just use Disk Utilty to make a disk image on the hard drive, that sits alongside existing files. Mount the disk image and point CCC or SD to that, and they will operate only inside the disk image.
CCC or SD do not necessarily take more or less time than Time Machine. It depends on how much data you have. If you have a lot of data (I don't know, 50GB or more) it can take a couple hours to restore from those programs, also depending on whether you are using FireWire 800 (fastest) FW400, or USB 2 (oh god please no). I have tried a Time Machine restore, and it didn't take as long as I thought, but there wasn't much user data on that test machine. I wonder if Time Machine might take longer than CCC or SD when large amounts of user data are involved. The reason I wonder is that Time Machine must do some thinking as it reassembles the disk from a combination of the OS X install DVD and various backed up files, while all CCC and SD have to do is rip the restore right off the hard disk in one continuous stream, straight through, no detours.
Anybody timed the restore with many GB of user data between these methods?