Would this work? Restore from Carbon Copy Cloner, then Time Machine

[laser71]

Hi All,

I'm new to the OSX family, and am working on setting up my backup & recovery technique.

I have two drives:
1) 1TB USB drive hooked up to my router, which will do Time Machine updates every hour.
2) 1TB Firewire drive that I'll do a Carbon Copy Clone with on a weekly basis.

If my computer suddenly died, what I think I'd hope to do is immediately restore with the CCC drive (and perhaps use it in the intern). The disc image should not be any more than a week out of date.

Then I'd like to take the Time Machine drive and use it to catch up on any files that have been modified since the clone was made.

Would this work? Any flaws in my logic, or ways you might do this differently?

 

[nikhsub1]

Would this work? Any flaws in my logic, or ways you might do this differently?

IMO there is no need for the weekly images... I actually had to reinstall the OS on my wife's laptop a week ago, all I did was erase the disk, install, restore from time machine. I have actually done this many times. It works brilliantly. Reimaging from (CCC) wont really save you any time since to reimage takes as long or longer than reinstalling the OS. I myself just got the new laptop in my sig, it took under 3 hours to restore from time machine all of my data which was just under 250GB. Wirelessly via time capsule.

 

[Guy Mancuso]

I do weekly backups with CCC to externals drives but the key here is i never keep images or data on my machine that is not backed up somewhere else to start so unless I do something to my system itself a week or two would make no difference. I do NOT use time machine.

I'm a photographer by trade and as soon as images are downloaded to my desktop it immediately gets copied to a external and also to a Drobo Raid 5 setup. This way no matter what I have my data somewhere else also. I would not trust time machine to handle this amount of data by itself. I trust myself more to actually copy data at the time it hits my desktop. Obviously this will all depend on what you do but I just don't have a lot of faith in time machine.

 

[nikhsub1]

I do weekly backups with CCC to externals drives but the key here is i never keep images or data on my machine that is not backed up somewhere else to start so unless I do something to my system itself a week or two would make no difference. I do NOT use time machine.

I'm a photographer by trade and as soon as images are downloaded to my desktop it immediately gets copied to a external and also to a Drobo Raid 5 setup. This way no matter what I have my data somewhere else also. I would not trust time machine to handle this amount of data by itself. I trust myself more to actually copy data at the time it hits my desktop. Obviously this will all depend on what you do but I just don't have a lot of faith in time machine.

You sound like you need to look into something like Carbonite.

 

[laser71]

Thanks for the responses and thoughts. My reason for wanting a weekly clone is two part:
1) A completely separate backup that is disconnected from the computer/power most of the time, backed up using an entirely different software method.
2) One that I can very quickly boot from - for example, using by gf's Macbook temporarily with my image if mine ever died.

Does anyone have an idea if you would be able to restore newer files from Time Machine to the CC Clone?

 

[shreddy]

Does anyone have an idea if you would be able to restore newer files from Time Machine to the CC Clone?

Don't see why not, but I don't think you can boot the CC clone and then "update" it from the TM backup. To restore from TM don't you have to boot from the OSX discs and then install from a TM backup?

That's the way I've done it (and worked perfectly) and if that's the only way then I don't see that having the CC clone offers any advantage when it comes to doing a TM restore...