Serious Backup

use Carbon Copy Cloner

I've used Carbon Copy Cloner and it works great for me. I had to restore my boot drive and it worked as expected.

I prefer Time Machine for the underlined reason below:

Time Machine is the built-in backup feature of OS X that works with your Mac and an external drive (sold separately) or AirPort Time Capsule. Connect the drive, tell Time Machine to use it, and relax. Time Machine automatically backs up your entire Mac, including system files, applications, accounts, preferences, email messages, music, photos, movies, and documents. But what makes Time Machine different from other backup applications is that it not only keeps a spare copy of every file, it remembers how your system looked on any given day—so you can revisit your Mac as it appeared in the past. Time Machine keeps hourly backups for the past 24 hours, daily backups for the past month, and weekly backups until your backup drive is full.

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When a Time Machine backup runs, it only backs up new or changed files. So it's not like it's literally making multiple copies of your entire iPhoto library each time -- just the new photos that you add to it (or change in it).

Carbon Copy Cloner and SuperDuper! are great, but when you use them to literally just clone your Mac's HDD, those backups they don't let you go back in time (past the last backup).

For example, if your routine is to create a new CCC/SuperDuper! clone of your Mac's HDD each week, if you figured out that you accidentally deleted a file several months ago, your last CCC/SuperDuper! backup would only have files from up to a week ago.

Personally, I use Time Machine (over the network) on all of the Macs in my house. Doing a full system restore from Time Machine over the network is possible, but slow. It's been great for retrieving individual files/folders though. If I'm going to do a full system restore (i.e. I just bought a new Mac and want to restore a backup from my old Mac onto it), then I'll use CCC/SuperDuper! just for that one backup/restore.

The great thing about a clone of OS X is that one can boot from that external! This will help greatly if you have a hard drive crash and replacement.

Time Machine is great to get back older copies on applications/files you accentually delete or bad update them.

A best backup is to have one clone, one Time Machine and one offsite online backup (if you have good hi-fi speed with no bandwidth limits). If you don't have reliable bandwidth then consider 2 clones with one clone going to safety deposit box (in another town) once a week brought back for another clone.

aristobrat said:

For example, if your routine is to create a new CCC/SuperDuper! backup each week, if you figured out that you accidentally deleted a file several months ago, your last CCC/SuperDuper! backup would only have files from up to a week ago.
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Apparently you do not understand CCC achieve changed files settings.
It is all about how you set CCC to handle your backups in regards to archiving modified or changed files.
You can have it set so you can retrieve a version of a file from "X" days ago.
As the old saying goes...
RTFM!

jbarley said:

Apparently you do not understand CCC achieve changed files settings.

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Apparently I didn't. So it takes changed/deleted files and dumps them all into a folder called "_CCC Archives" at the root level of the destination drive... Thanks for pointing that out.