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Carbon Copy Cloner vs. Time Machine

T

tigress666

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Apr 14, 2010
3,288
17
Washington State
Alright, which is better?

I am thinking of trying out CCC cause I've had enough of random Time Machine Snafus (or rather sick of everytime I re-install the OS, and not a clean install, it suddenly decides it is either a different computer, or stops remembering how to erase old backups to make more room on my backup drive. I've had to erase my backups once because it refused to acknowledge the previous backup as the same as mine after installing the OS, and now it claims there is no room though I'm pretty sure it's using the same backup, but I think it's not erasing old ones).

Plus, I get the impression that CCC creates a bootable external disk too from my backup hard drive? Do I have that straight? Since I'm thinking of going to Lion that would be really nice (otherwise I'll have to buy a USB too to create an install disk as well as a new backup hard drive cause this time I'm not willing to lose my backups I already have).
 
I don't have CCC, though I've read a lot of posts about it. I believe CCC just basically makes a clone of your drive, which as you mentioned is bootable. I am thinking about getting it soon and using both Time Machine and CCC. That way Time Machine would keep my daily activities backed up and tie me over to my CCC backups, that would probably be once every few weeks.
 
SumoHamster said:
I don't have CCC, though I've read a lot of posts about it. I believe CCC just basically makes a clone of your drive, which as you mentioned is bootable. I am thinking about getting it soon and using both Time Machine and CCC. That way Time Machine would keep my daily activities backed up and tie me over to my CCC backups, that would probably be once every few weeks.
Click to expand...

It appeared on CCC's site that they were saying that it also did incremental backups? But maybe I misread that?

http://www.bombich.com/ccc_features.html
 
CCC does do incremental backups as well.

I use both TM and CCC. Time Machine for document recovery and CCC for a complete system restore. I found Time Machine to be a bit slow on a restore so CCC was better imo
 
I use CCC exclusively. I make bootable backups and then keep those backups current through incremental backups. It works extremely well. I haven't found a need for TM, since I never have the need to go back to a previous version of a file.
 
I tried out CCC as a replacement for Simple RsyncX (I used it to backup my ext drive to another drive), it seems to be a good replacement - only issue I have is it doesn't remember the settings so I have to config it everytime I start up.

Anyone else have that problem.
 
Kebabselector said:
I tried out CCC as a replacement for Simple RsyncX (I used it to backup my ext drive to another drive), it seems to be a good replacement - only issue I have is it doesn't remember the settings so I have to config it everytime I start up.

Anyone else have that problem.
Click to expand...
Have you saved your preferences in Scheduled Tasks? It works perfectly fine for me.
 
More complimentary than competitive

CCC can do incremental or full backups. It can run backup jobs on a schedule. It can be a complete back-up strategy.

It is not neccessarily a replacement of Time Machine.

Time Machine creates easy to access, versioned backups backups. Easy to access is a very nice feature. Time Machine's easy to access point-in-time backups are also very nice.

I use both. I let Time Machine do it's thing, keeping everything backed up on a very frequent cycle. When I am about to make a mojor change (like upgrading to Lion), I also create a bootable image using CCC. I then make sure that my bootable image actually boots before I make the change. Much of the stuff that I back-up through Time Machine is actually stored on External drives. I don't include that in my CCC backups, although I'm pretty sure that I could if I wanted to.

Time Machine does a great job of doing background backups to catch the minor changes (like say downloading a new album from iTunes), but sometimes I want a CCC Image of my boot drive for a specific purpose.
 
They both have advantages so using them both doesn't do any harm.

Personally i use CCC to create a bootable clone (which is done both daily and weekly to separate partitions) and a Drobo for Time Machine backups.

Time Machine is great if you wanna go back and retrieve something you accidentally deleted or lost etc. but for sheer convenience the bootable clones made by CCC cloner can be a lifesaver if your HD dies, or if you need to boot using another pc, or need to restore your setup to another mac.
 
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