CCC vs TimeMachine vs Manual Backup?

[aznboi91]

CCC vs TimeMachine vs Manual Backup?

I'm looking for best practices and backup strategies to backup my photos library, music library, and documents folder.

Does CCC do incremental backups? Meaning that it will start with a base and incrementally backup only changes similar to Time Machine?

Is there selective folder backup features that I can take advantage of?

What is you prefered backup methods? Thanks!

Would love to hear experiences of TimeMachine vs Carbon Copy Cloner. Thanks!

 

[SalisburySam]

I seem to have acquired several backup facilities over time, including Norton Security backup to their cloud, and backup utilities in other software. For my use cases, TimeMachine remains the easiest to use and accompanied by a big fat fast attached hard drive has worked very very well. Yes, there are some instances where this won’t work such as when the hard drive spins into oblivion or is stolen. For those cases, I have key data files backed up with Norton but this does not include photos/videos/music files. And terabytes of Apple iCloud storage is just laughably expensive. I have an acquaintance who handles backups essentially the same way I do with one addition: they have three identical 8TB hard drives. One is locally attached and the primary backup. Daily (yes, daily) they copy the entire contents of that drive to one of the other two drives. Weekly, they put that drive into their bank’s safe deposit vault withdrawing the third drive that was there. Lather, rinse, repeat every week.

 

[Fishrrman]

Yes, of course CCC does "incremental" backups.

CCC even has a feature called "safety net" which will "archive" older versions of files (that have changes since the last incremental backup).

It's one of the best pieces of software for the Mac today.

Having said that, SuperDuper is similar in concept and is a "close second".

 

[Apple_Robert]

CCC for the win. In my opinion, it is far ahead of Time Machine in features, not to mention reliability.

 

[Weaselboy]

Would love to hear experiences of TimeMachine vs Carbon Copy Cloner.

I think you will find a lot of people here who use both. TM is better if you want to say find a version of a document from August 23 and restore it. CCC is at its core more of a full system cloning tool, although they have added a versioning feature, but it is not as easy to access as TM is.

I use TM full time for hourly backups then do a CCC clone once a week or so.

I also backup my home folder online daily using the app Arq.

 

[flowrider]

SuperDuper for me

Lou

 

[aznboi91]

CCC for the win. In my opinion, it is far ahead of Time Machine in features, not to mention reliability.

What do you mean in reliability? Is Time Machine not reliable?

I think you will find a lot of people here who use both. TM is better if you want to say find a version of a document from August 23 and restore it. CCC is at its core more of a full system cloning tool, although they have added a versioning feature, but it is not as easy to access as TM is.

I use TM full time for hourly backups then do a CCC clone once a week or so.

I also backup my home folder online daily using the app Arq.

Sounds like a great idea. I might steal this.
I'm running a 3TB fusion drive. Should I allocate a 4TB to all time machine or split it between carbon copy and timemachine?

 

[Weaselboy]

I'm running a 3TB fusion drive. Should I allocate a 4TB to all time machine or split it between carbon copy and timemachine?

I would use a separate drive for each, that way you have redundancy. Get a drive about twice the size of the amount of data you think you might have. So if you anticipate having 1TB of data, get a 2TB drive to give you some room for versioning.

There is a long thread here on Arq that might help you if you want to go that route also.

 

[mikzn]

Does CCC do incremental backups? Meaning that it will start with a base and incrementally backup only changes similar to Time Machine?

Is there selective folder backup features that I can take advantage of?

What is you prefered backup methods? Thanks!

Another CCC fan here - I have a few weekly scripts set up in CCC - very easy to do

my Mojave BAK file - clones everything weekly - first step

but just in case - music is backed up on a different date and different drive
but just in case - Photos are backed up on a different date and different drive
Outlook - over 15 years of emails and contacts - backed up separately from Mojave Clone
Passwords - Credit Cards, Bank account info, Web Logins, software serials, etc - backed up separately from Mojave clone and separate drive

CCC is great software - see screen shot for more info

 

[Erehy Dobon]

.

 

[billdakelski]

I have wasted sooo much time trying various backup apps, just stick with CCC it works great and relatively easy. And yes it does incremental backups, as well as remembers custom backup settings for various drives

 

[tarsins]

TM, nightly ARQ of documents, weekly CCC. Don't rely on manual backups because you'll forget to do them.

 

[SackJabbit]

I use both Time Machine and CCC. Like Weaselboy, I use Time Machine more frequently for file versioning; so I have a portable drive plugged in all the time for hourly backup. I also have a second Time Machine drive which I plug in when I come home at the end of the day, so I have two copies of TM that rotates. I also use CCC, which gets plugged in once a day too; I like CCC as a copy which I can boot to if some thing happens to my internal drive.

 

[vbctv]

I recently had to do a clean install of Catalina, I found that iCloud actually worked best for me. all my apps were able to be re-downloaded from the App Store and all my files were in iCloud. I think Time Machine is past it's expiration date. I didn't need to use it at all, despite the fact that I keep backups on it and keep it plugged in. It's making me think about unplugging it and not worrying about it.
Personally I think Apple needs to create an iCloud version of Time Machine or something like iCloud Backup on iOS for macOS.
But with how macOS works now with the App Store and keeping the Desktop & Documents folder in the iCloud. There is less need for Time Machine or any backup, just my personal opinion. My Photos & Music library are kept on an external SSD and always have been so Time Machine isn't even backing those up. Plus my Photos are also in iCloud. And since iTunes became Apple Music app, we won't even talk about how bad the library doesn't want to work. They want you to use Apple Music and not your library apparently.
And for my business stuff, I use iCloud also...
And Apple did now put iCloud on their backup page for macOS. https://support.apple.com/mac-backup
I actually started a thread a few months ago about this after an Apple employee at Apple Store said iCloud is now the backup method for macOS.

 

[KALLT]

I have not had any problems with Time Machine and would not discourage anyone from using it. That said, it is a good strategy to have multiple backups anyway and a different backup software can give you additional assurance.

 

[dogslobber]

Please support CCC if you use it!

 

[Codpeace]

I use TM and CCC. CCC is a fine piece of software.

TM does its thing but will fill a drive if you let it. So I use CCC to create and maintain nightly a current disk image on the same 4TB NAS drive that TM uses (my MBP has a 1TB drive, so the 4TB backup drive is plenty big). That disk image is easier to access than TM but doesn't keep archival copies of stuff like TM does, just the current state.

I also keep bootable CCC clones of my machine on a couple of other external drives that I update every week or two. As somebody mentioned above, CCC has "Safety Net" which maintains archival versions of files to the extent that your drive has room for them.

End result is that I have an easy-to-access network copy of everything fresh (CCC disk image), a harder to access network copy of archival stuff (TM), and then reasonably recent bootable clones on multiple external drives. This set of redundancies is sufficient for my peace of mind.

 

[lasloduncan]

I have not had any problems with Time Machine and would not discourage anyone from using it. That said, it is a good strategy to have multiple backups anyway and a different backup software can give you additional assurance.

nothing but problems with tm iMac 2017 ventura so much so I have given up.....ccc for me .....