I might be backing up my MBP for the first time in the next few days.

Before you do something drastic, a couple questions...

You say you deleted a Systems Prefs icon from your dock. Did you just delete it from the dock or from the Applications folder within the dock?

What happens if you click on the symbol at the top-left of your screen and choose "System Preferences" from the menu?

...

I would do a time machine backup onto an external drive and then once you reinstall use migration assistant to transfer it back. That said if you just removed it from the dock its not an issue the dock is just shortcuts not the actual application

Seriously, if you don't have any backups, and anything goes wrong with your computer and you lose everything, that is exactly what you deserve. It's not "I might be backing up for the first time in the next few days". It's "Get in the car, drive to a shop selling hard drives _right now_".

Step 1: Buy an external hard drive. Any cheap USB hard drive will do just fine. Just make sure that it is big enough. With current prices, I wouldn't bother buying anything less than one GB.

Step 2: Plug the hard drive into your Mac and turn it on. Start "Disk Utility". Click on the icon for your new drive. Click on "Partition", choose 1 Partition + Format = "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)". Rename the hard drive to "Backup" or something similar.

Step 3: In "System Preferences", choose "Time Machine". Select your new "Backup" disk as the backup disk. In "Options", set the "Backup" disk itself as excluded from backups. Turn "Time Machine" on. Wait some hours until your Mac is completely backed up.

After following steps 1 and 2 you may use an alternative method to time machine...use disk utility to clone the entire drive.

In the event of a catastrophe I can boot up to my external and be back up running in no time with everything identical.

From there I can just clone my system drive from the external

To do this you use Disk Utility -> Restore

gnasher729 said:

Advice

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Listen to ^^this^^! Heed it!

gnasher729 said:

Step 1: Buy an external hard drive. Any cheap USB hard drive will do just fine. Just make sure that it is big enough. With current prices, I wouldn't bother buying anything less than one GB.

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I'm assuming you mean 1 TB?

Newbie Backup Question: Time Machine vs Carbon Copy Or Similar

Just got a new 1TB drive and I'm ready to do a backup of my MBP for the first time. Quick question (hoping to avoid a flaming here for asking an obvious question! ): is there a difference between using Time Machine as a system backup and something like Carbon Copy (or similar) and is one method preferable to another? Is it advisable to do both so that I've got a bootable copy as well?

Thanks

There is a lot of debate on Time machine vs Carbon Copy Cloner/SuperDuper.

time machine is incremental and works in the background. You can quickly restore individual files or whole system, but it takes time.

SuperDuper/CCC make a bootable clone image, which you can immediately boot to and recover an entire system quickly. You can also access the Superduper clone.

I prefer to use both, but to separate external HDs.

OnAirNow said:

Just got a new 1TB drive and I'm ready to do a backup of my MBP for the first time. Quick question (hoping to avoid a flaming here for asking an obvious question! ): is there a difference between using Time Machine as a system backup and something like Carbon Copy (or similar) and is one method preferable to another? Is it advisable to do both so that I've got a bootable copy as well?

Thanks

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Yes, there is a considerable difference. Time Machine backs up a state of your hard drive and allows you to recover files from that state, or even the entire hard drive. However, if you find yourself in the position that you have to do a full recovery from a Time Machine backup, you need to reinstall the operating system first and then restore the Time Machine backup. Time Machine is especially useful if you might need different states of the same file. To be effective, it consumes a lot of disk space and can slow down your system when it runs.

Personally, I use the cloning method through SuperDuper. I run it once a week during the night, and it clones my entire hard drive to an external hard drive. If I lose my main hard drive, I can boot from the external hard drive and have my operating system and data files exactly as they were at the last back up. I can then fully restore my main hard drive by cloning the copy back over. This has saved my bacon a couple of times, and makes moving to a new mac really easy.

Thanks old-wiz and Mike457, I appreciate your advice.

I think that at the moment I'm edging towards a Carbon Copy or Super Duper clone of the HD (btw, is there any real difference between the 2 programs? Is there a consensus one is 'better' than the other?). I think that if I had a desktop Mac perhaps Time Machine would be a sensible option if I had a HD constantly attached. As it's my MBP I think the backups would probably be only weekly so I'm not sure I'd get the full benefit of the differing states of files that TM seems so suited to.

As an aside, does anyone include cloud backups in their routine? A friend recommended something like Backblaze? I suspect that given my upload speed my initial backup would be painfully slow!

Thanks.

bensnowden said:

I'm assuming you mean 1 TB?

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I meant one TB but should you find a hard drive under one GB, then _don't buy it_.

OnAirNow said:

Just got a new 1TB drive and I'm ready to do a backup of my MBP for the first time. Quick question (hoping to avoid a flaming here for asking an obvious question! ): is there a difference between using Time Machine as a system backup and something like Carbon Copy (or similar) and is one method preferable to another? Is it advisable to do both so that I've got a bootable copy as well?

Click to expand...

Time Machine has the advantage that it keeps track of your history, as long as the storage lasts. So if you deleted a file a month ago and you figure it out only now, it will still be on your time machine backup from a month ago. With Carbon Copy or similar it would have been gone.

If your hard drive crashes, then no backup = total disaster, Time Machine = big annoyance, Carbon Copy = smaller annoyance. But especially on a desktop machine or if you use Time Capsule, Time Machine makes sure that you actually _have_ a backup.

Gnasher,

This might be one of those "how long is a piece of string?" questions, but you made a point I hadn't thought about with regard to TM. As its a historical backup, would you have an idea how long it would take the storage to run out? I guess it depends on frequency of backup and size of files? I guess someone must've filled up their TM backup at some point! 1TB is a pretty cheap option for externals HDs these days (I got mine for <£50) and I would've thought it would take a fair while to file that with 'standard', non-'pro' computing usage - emails, notes, word proc docs, keynotes presentations, occasional photos etc.

Also, can TM be used with an online backup service or must it be a local HD?

OnAirNow said:

Also, can TM be used with an online backup service or must it be a local HD?

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AFAIK, TM cannot be used with an online service unless that service presents some means of mounting a remote volume.

It can be used with a network share on your LAN however, so it doesn't specifically have to be a direct-connected drive.

How far back in time you can go based on storage availability is so utterly dependent on how much data you change on a daily/weekly/monthly basis that I can't imagine drawing useful conclusions from other people's info. Someone who changes 100MB of stuff a day will see their TM backup go further into history than someone who changes 10GB of stuff a day.

I have my TM backups going to an old desktop repurposed as a server in the basement. I've never noticed any slowdowns. I love how transparent it is as a system, I set it up and can forget about it. The one thing I did ensure was that Parallels 6 is set NOT to backup my Win7 instance; it's just for a couple pieces of software, so no big deal to recreate and TM sees it as an 8GB chunk of info needing to be backed up every time I use the VM.

When I did a test restore a few days ago onto a spare HDD, it took about four hours to reload 110GB of stuff using a hardwired ethernet cable to the network. (backups are worthless if you can't restore; ALWAYS test your method at least once to ensure it will work! and it goes without saying that you should test it non-destructively... I swapped my HDD with a spare I had and did the restore to the spare; original was safely snuggled in an electrostatic bag away from the MBP)

I prefer CCC, just for the piece of mind that if my HD crashes, I can plug in my external and be right back where I was. Also, after having done the original full backup, I do an incremental backup every few days or so, just to adjust the changes in files/OS updates/etc. that have occurred in the past few days.

Tyler23 said:

Also, after having done the original full backup, I do an incremental backup every few days or so, just to adjust the changes in files/OS updates/etc. that have occurred in the past few days.

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Can I ask, do you mean you do a full, bootable, clone of your HD and then subsequently backup only what's changed? In other words, my first step is to make a full clone of the MBP HD then continue to use the same external HD that clone is on to do incremental backups? That won't stop the backup being bootable?

Thanks.

OnAirNow said:

Can I ask, do you mean you do a full, bootable, clone of your HD and then subsequently backup only what's changed? In other words, my first step is to make a full clone of the MBP HD then continue to use the same external HD that clone is on to do incremental backups? That won't stop the backup being bootable?

Thanks.

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With Carbon Copy Cloner (my backup method of choice), you first (with a clean External HD preferably) make a complete, bootable clone of your HD. You can then change the settings from Full Clone to a setting that will allow for your bootable clone to remain intact, but it will then make alterations to the bootable clone based on your activities since your last backup.

So, when I did the first backup, a full, bootable clone was made of my HD. Since then, I have added new music files, photos, apps etc., and deleted some of the same. Since then, I have plugged my External back in, ran CCC with its incremental backups option, which basically keeps the bootable clone intact, while updating your system to its current "as is" state.

It's a great little thing, CCC.

Thanks for the reply.

I did the backup last night, though opted for the option that *wasnt't* the clone but CCC still says it's a bootable backup and I plan to do the incremental backups based on this original.

Hope that was the right thing to do!

Why not do the full clone? I'm not really sure how that all works..as the incremental backup backs up what has changed..so if you had nothing backed up before, did it do a full clone anyways?

hmm..

a-m-k said:

Well, I bought an external har-drive yesterday and think I have it set up. (Thankfully, I have my cousin-in-law down the street who's a MAC "geek", too.) I think I backed up things and now all I have to do is re-install OSX. (Even if I could have done that sooner, I really couldn't because OSX was pre-installed and I didn't think of buying the current OSX disk.)
So I am fairly sure I am going to be ok. First big error was a walk in the park compared to what I used to have to deal with.

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First, it is "Mac" not "MAC", which is something to do with networking, not sure what. You really should have a viable OS X Install DIsk, one that works with your hardware, the SL disk is only $29 from Apple. Running the default install from that disk will not delete your data or settings, unless you specifically erase the disk using the Disk Utility application. Doing a reinstall and subsequent updates is the perfect solution for a mistake like yours (accidentally deleting the System Preferences application or some other system-related file). The no-backup situation is another thing altogether, with the potential data loss aspect, but of course if you had a bootable clone you could have just copied the application back to the HD.
We all make mistakes like that, don't take it too seriously, if I had a dime for every error I have made in the course of over 25 years using a Mac, I could buy us both a BIG backup drive!