Time Machine Alternatives

Octafish,

I use SuperDuper! to perform a clone of my drive, that way I have everything and can immediately switch over if there is a major problem and I'm on a deadline. I haven't used CCC in a while but I think the differences between them now are minor. SuperDuper! allows incremental clone updating so only the changed files are added. It will also put your machine to sleep or shut down at the end of the process so it's handy to do at night.

However, I used SD in conjunction with Time Machine. There are times when I admittedly forget to run SD and I like that Time Machine always has me covered. Plus if I accidently delete a file, it's on Time Machine but it will be removed from my clone when I back up next.

SD also allows scheduled backups.

I think that the program, logically named "Backup", available to members of MobileMe (silly new name for the former dot Mac) works really well, has many options for scheduling, and is far more flexible than TimeMachine, which can't be scheduled, and seems to sometimes run more frequently than every hour.

In addition, TM appears to be a resource hog.

Backup is an alternative, however it doesn't offer a bootable clone alternative AFAIK. A year or so ago my hard drive died, utterly, and SuperDuper not only prevented me from losing more than a couple hours' work, it also let me boot off my external drive and just keep working.

A good point George, about the bootable clone. If that's a key criterion of your backup solution, then Backup doesn't address it. Personally, I've never had to use a bootable clone, though I have taken the precaution of occassionally creating a disk image, on a Mac via Disk Utility. Admittedly, not a unified solution, but operationally seems complete.

I think the bottom line for me is that TM holds a lot of promise, and is very convenient - it's not perfect, though it will probably improve in the future.

Read the documentation and if you have questions, post to the CCC forum at http://forums.bombich.com/. Note that I moderate those forums.

B. Bruce Brinson wrote:
A good point George, about the bootable clone. If that's a key criterion of your backup solution, then Backup doesn't address it. Personally, I've never had to use a bootable clone, though I have taken the precaution of occassionally creating a disk image, on a Mac via Disk Utility. Admittedly, not a unified solution, but operationally seems complete.

Be wary of .dmg backups.
Read this thread and the very sad thread referenced in it.
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=7795498&#7795498
I would never use a .dmg as a backup. Never.

Message was edited by: nerowolfe

B. Bruce Brinson wrote:
A good point George, about the bootable clone. If that's a key criterion of your backup solution, then Backup doesn't address it. Personally, I've never had to use a bootable clone, though I have taken the precaution of occassionally creating a disk image, on a Mac via Disk Utility.

A bootable clone is testable. You can immediately boot into in and run and use it. It's foolproof.
I still have my Tiger clones on the "bottom" of my TM drives. They both work fine and I occasionally run them.
I have a separate LaCie drive for making SuperDuper clones of my current OSs, once a week or whenever I think it's time, in addition to TM, which, for me has performed flawlessly since November when I installed Leopard on all three of my Macs.

There's no linked thread in your post. Am I missing something?

Thanks, I just fixed it.

A key backup criterion is to ensure that the backup is usable; therefore, a bootable backup is optimum because it doesn't need restoring to ensure that it's viable.

baltwo wrote:
A key backup criterion is to ensure that the backup is usable; therefore, a bootable backup is optimum because it doesn't need restoring to ensure that it's viable.

It also provides a true backup. If the HD fails, the user can still run the OS from the clone while repairs or replacements are being made.
Any other type of backup is useless without an OS.

Yesterday I would have argued with you about TM. Today I found out that the backups it had made since april are gone! Not only that but it had changed the name of my computer in it's backups and I can't figure out how to change it back because it keeps telling me I don't have sufficient privileges. Even though my account has administrator privileges. So today I agree with you.

As far as other backups are concerned I have been using SuperDuper for the last couple of yeas in a rather esoteric way, and have restored from it a couple of times when I pushed the wrong button. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday I do a SD b/u to a partition on an external drive. Then on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday I do a b/u from the first external drive to a partition on a separate external drive, so I'm never without a b/u more than a day old. Redundancy. If it's good enough for NASA it's good enough for my iMac.

To me the advantage of TM is that it provides a quick and easy way to restore a file that hasn't yet been backed up by another means. If it has become something that can't be depended on, what's the point of taking up disk space? I guess for now I'll just assign it to another partition and see how it works for a while before getting rid of it, or just turning it off.

Thanks for the pointers - useful information. Of course, I didn't indicate I use a dmg as my only backup, just an extra archive to have lying around. Mostly I use Backup, and still have TM running, though I'm considering turning it off since it's such a resource hog.