Time Machine or CCC for new external SSD

therocksal said:

I read an article where the author said to use Time Machine to restore to a new external SSD from a hard drive instead of CCC. Is there really any difference? I am buying a 256GB external SSD to use as with the O/S and all apps with my mac mini.

Thanks.

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Been using CCC for the last 4 months with excellent results.

What make of External SSD are you buying?

therocksal said:

I've decided to use CCC to make a clone backup of the SSD onto a partition on the internal 1 TB drive. Then, will use CCC to make a backup of the 2nd partition on the internal drive with all my video, photos, music to my NAS.

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It's a bit better to clone your system disk to an external as if your Mac goes down you have a current system you can instantly boot another Mac with (although you can of course get the disks out), and also it's better backup practice to copy to an external that you can put in a different place to the Mac say if you go away or take with you (as I do).

What I do is incrementally clone my 500GB SSD to an external every day or so, and also run Time Machine to a partition on the 1TB internal. But I keep most of my live work files on the SSD and I also use Dropbox for work files. It would be awful if I lost the work files and this way they are in three places.

M.

You won't comprehend just HOW EASY it is to do this job using either CCC or SuperDuper! until you've actually done it.

The above two cloning apps make cloning an entire drive as easy as copying a file or folder from one location to another.

Weaselboy said:

If you are just using it to move to a new SSD install, there is zero difference. Both will have the exact same end result.

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Can you create a bootable clone with TM? I know you can restore a disk from a backup, but if you don't have a backup...

M.

Weaselboy said:

If you pop in a new SSD/HDD you can then option key boot to the TM backup disk and use Disk Util to format the new disk, then restore completely.

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Yes but this presumes you have another disk or partition with a TM backup. If you just have a system on an HDD you can't then create a bootable clone on an external SSD using TM?

M.

Weaselboy said:

I'm not sure what you are trying to say? I thought I explained the difference between a TM backup and a clone you could run the computer from in my previous comment.

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Let's say you have a single volume HDD and want to put the same bootable volume on an external SSD. I'm just saying you can't do that directly using TM - you have to create a TM backup somewhere first, whereas with SuperDuper/CCC you can directly clone the volume.

M.

Weaselboy said:

However, you could also use the included OS X Disk Utility to clone the disk to the SSD and still would not need SD/CCC unless you just wanted the utility anyway.

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Yes that is true. But using SuperDuper is way simpler to explain to non-experts (family etc.) than it is to explain to them how to do this using Disk Utility, in my experience.

marclondon asked above:
[[ Can you create a bootable clone with TM? ]]

The answer is, simply stated: No.

TM will establish a "recovery partition" of sorts that you can boot from, BUT, it will not be "fully bootable".

By "fully bootable" I mean that one is able to boot to the finder, manipulate files and folders, run apps and have access to all one's data.

TM -can not- do that.
The cloning apps -- CarbonCopyCloner and SuperDuper -- CAN do that for you.

I posted this before above, and I will repeat:
You will not comprehend HOW EASY it is to use a cloning app like CCC or SD until you've tried it once.
Trying it will "hurt nothing" -- if you don't like the results, just re-initialize the backup drive and go back to whatever you were using before.

Fishrrman said:

marclondon asked above:
[[ Can you create a bootable clone with TM? ]]

The answer is, simply stated: No.

TM will establish a "recovery partition" of sorts that you can boot from, BUT, it will not be "fully bootable".

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You can restore a bootable volume from a TM backup, that's the point.

As for Disk Utility, I didn't realise you can use that to create a bootable clone, but obviously it's not a backup program and only apps such as CCC and SuperDuper give you incremental backup to an instantly bootable volume.

M.

I use one of each.

The time machine for incremental backup.

The CCC disk as a last ditch master backup device.

gpspad said:

I use one of each.

The time machine for incremental backup.

The CCC disk as a last ditch master backup device.

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In my opinion, that is the route to go. It is important to backup your backup. I don't think it safe or wise to rely on one manner of backup.

Personally, I have had nothing but trouble restoring from a time machine backup. Preferences files are often missing or corrupt, things just don't work that well. The reason is because TM doesn't back up every file - it ignored many system files. For example, TM doesn't back up your host file. If you have manual entries in your host file, they will be lost when you do a TM restore. It might not matter 99.9% of the time, but it annoys me that I have to worry whether TM considers this or that directory important enough to back up.

If things go south with my computer, I think the best is to have a bootable image of my old drive as it existed on the day it died, so I can have a bit for bit restore. CCC does this, and it's $40 well spent.

oneMadRssn said:

Personally, I have had nothing but trouble restoring from a time machine backup.

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Agreed - it's not really designed for this. It's designed to take snapshots of files such as documents over time. CCC/SuperDuper make bootable clones that copy almost everything bar some unimportant cache and tmp files.

M.