Time Machine

[Evren Carven]

Do you use Time Machine for your Mac?

 

[keysofanxiety]

Where's the "I used to, but I'm too lazy to plug in a USB hard-drive every now and then" option?

But yeah Time Machine is great, wouldn't recommend anything else for data backup on OS X.

 

[Dadioh]

Do you use Time Machine for your Mac?

Yes. But I plug in a hard drive via a removable dock on my Airport Extreme. All of the Macs in the house use it to backup and no need to plug in a USB drive to individual Macs. The advantage of the removable dock is that if the drive fails it is easy to replace (4 years now... touch wood) and I can also move the disk directly into a dock on my main Mac when I want to work directly on the disk without network bottleneck.

I wish more people would use some sort of backup solution. I repair Macs and about 90% of the time when people bring me their Mac with failing hard drive I ask if they have a backup and they just blink... backup? I can sometimes retrieve data for them if the corruption isn't too bad but it can be a laborious process using disk first aid tool.

 

[JackieInCo]

Yes. I have a TM backup for my MBP and one for my Mac Mini.

 

[0983275]

Yes, I also combine it with manual backing up of my Users folder with rsync every few days.

 

[CoastalOR]

I use TM once per day (first thing in the morning) using an external USB3 for my MBP. I use TM normally with an external connected full time to the Mac mini. I also do weekly Carbon Copy Clones to separate partitions on both Macs.

 

[Weaselboy]

Yep... Time Machine to a Time Capsule then a once a week or so encrypted CCC clone to a SSD in a USB3 enclosure. Then my /Users folder is backed up to Amazon S3 using Arq.

 

[mrex]

Time Machine app and NAS (raid1 for a fault-tolerance feature).

 

[MultiFinder17]

I have an external drive plugged into my home server for use as a Time Machine volume for all of my Macs.

 

[Miss Terri]

I have two backup drives (small, bus powered ones). I use one with Time Machine and the other with Super Duper! My reasoning is that they each do slightly different (complementary) things, and plus if one of the backup drives dies, I have the other.

I may be wrong (not an expert), but my envisioned use for the Super Duper! drive is my computer dies and I can then plug it into someone else's computer (or a loaner) and it will become "my computer," running off the external drive.

I basically use Time Machine to make moving to a new computer easy, but there's always the chance I'll use it for something else.

 

[Evren Carven]

It's interesting. Most people are using an external hard disk as a time machine backup storage disk. Why? Is it due to the price(The Time Capsule's price is $299.00 or $399.00 for 3 TB)? A common 2 TB external hard disk's price is less than $100. As an office worker, I would rather choose a common external hard disk as a backup disk. You may tell us your reasons for your choice.

Hope more people participate in this vote!

 

[e93to]

I back up my Macs at least once per week. Or everyday if I add something important to my computers.

I use both Time Machine and Carbon Copy Cloner. I don't use CCC as often because it takes long time to clone the entire drive.

 

[rugmankc]

It's interesting. Most people are using an external hard disk as a time machine backup storage disk. Why? Is it due to the price(The Time Capsule's price is $299.00 or $399.00 for 3 TB)? A common 2 TB external hard disk's price is less than $100. As an office worker, I would rather choose a common external hard disk as a backup disk. You may tell us your reasons for your choice.

Hope more people participate in this vote!

Thoughts on OPs comments welcome also--

My son had talked about giving me an Airport Time Capsule for regular daily backups to replace my external Porsche Design drive. I could then use that for clones with Super Duper. It would be an older Time Capsule, maybe two years. The wifi backups would be fine speed wise, as after initial backup, the incrementals are not large amounts. Right now I have an extra Lacie 500gb external I occasionally do a full backup to. And would use it to restore if Porsche failed.

 

[mrex]

It's interesting. Most people are using an external hard disk as a time machine backup storage disk. Why? Is it due to the price(The Time Capsule's price is $299.00 or $399.00 for 3 TB)? A common 2 TB external hard disk's price is less than $100. As an office worker, I would rather choose a common external hard disk as a backup disk. You may tell us your reasons for your choice.

Time Capsule has only one hard disk, so it isnt a good choice for backups. Better than nothing for sure, but If the disk becomes broken, all your files are gone. That is the reason why i use NAS and it's fault tolerance feature to make an identical copy of the harddisk. The NAS, that i have, has two hard disk in a raid1 setup. So if the another disk becomes broken, i can swap it without loosing my backups/files...

So when im using Time machine software, it copies my files to the nas and have two identical copies each on its own harddisk.