We talk of backups as if they were the holy grail of computing. They are. It’s the single most important task that keeps you from pulling your hair out. “Data that’s not backed up does not exist at all”. Whether you’re installing an OS update, downloading a new wallpaper, or even just starting up your Mac, having a backup couldn’t be more important. That is, if you value your data.
Okay, so we’ve agreed on backing up our data. “What’ve you got?” There’s three primary ways of getting your data backed up. The most obvious, is local backup on a hard drive attached to your Mac. It’s clean, fast, and effective in moving large volumes of data without having any impact on your workflow whatsoever. It’s also freakin’ cheap!
Next, is networked backup, maybe using some web service, but on your own storage somewhere accessible. It could be your computer in the den, or having identical copies of documents on your home desktop, notebook, and work computer.
Third, is the newest in technology buzz words: cloud storage. It’s your data, but on someone else’s servers. Depending on the reliability, the data on these servers is also backed up, so you’re almost completely safe from disaster—unless of course, the Transformers movie comes to life. This unfortunately is high in cost, depends on an extremely fast internet connection, and means your data is accessible by someone else—might not want to get those videos backed up.
•••
Now that you know with what we’re dealing with here, let’s take a look at your options, and which one’s the best in each category. We’ve been testing these backup solutions for months together (it’s a lot of hard work), getting a feel for their speed, usability, and reliability. Let’s start with local storage.
Time Machine
Ever since its introduction with Leopard, Time Machine has been adopted by millions of Mac users, I presume. It’s super easy to use, has one of the most gorgeous user interfaces you could imagine, and is one of the most hassle free ways of having your data set in time.
You can set it to exclude certain folders (I’d advise Movies and Downloads), and that’s about it. Time Machine will spin up every hour, backing up all the files that have changed, allowing you to restore at any point of time. If you want to change the backup intervals, check out the TimeMachineEditor app, a free download. So far Time Machine is the best, proven, and tested method of keeping your data safe. It ships with every new Mac, and I can’t see why you wouldn’t use it. Oh wait.
But, Time Machine has its caveats. It cannot do a bootable backup, so if your primary drive fails you cannot instantly boot from the new version. It took me 3.5 hours to restore a 180GB Time Machine backup. It can be a space hog, eating up gigabytes of data if you’re not careful enough to exclude heavy unimportant folders. It only backs up the startup disk, leaving other partitions and attached storage unprotected As pointed by Steven and Keith, it does indeed backup other partitions, even external drives. Its wireless backup is restricted to Time Capsule drives. Still, all these are minor compared to the convenience it offers.
SuperDuper
A top favourite backup system in the early days of Mac OS X (remember when Time Machine didn’t exist?), SuperDuper is still used for its versatility. SuperDuper can backup all your files, moving them to a hard drive, partition, flash drive, disk image, or even a network storage location. You can even boot from this drive, if it’s available during startup. SuperDuper can also backup just the user folder, eliminating the need to store OS files and applications. This of course cannot be used to boot off from.
Notice the clear instructions in plain simple english
SuperDuper also has an interesting feature, especially for advanced users. Sandboxing. SuperDuper will backup only the system files onto an external drive, and make it bootable. You can then boot from that system, but still use your ‘normal’ desktop as in, the same user folder. All your documents are intact, but you’re on a different system. You can use this to install flaky software, test OS updates, as well as quickly recover should your primary OS get corrupted for some reason. This of course does not backup your unrecoverable files, so beware.
SuperDuper costs $25 to register your copy, but you can use the unregistered copy for as long as you want. The only feature withheld is the ability to schedule your backups, which isn’t on my priority list. Also, the paid version allows incremental backups, which are much faster for backing up after the first time [Thanks Keith!]. SuperDuper has the most intuitive and easy to understand user interface, so that you know exactly what’s going to happen when you hit the button. [SuperDuper was previously reviewed on SA]
Carbon Copy Cloner
While some swear by SuperDuper, there’s a lot of users who use Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) for their backup needs. Why would you use it? Well for one, it’s free (ad-supported). The unregistered version of SuperDuper can do most of what CCC does and more, except for the scheduled backups and incremental backups, which are included in CCC.
That said, I find SuperDuper to be much more powerful, especially in the choices that it offers for backup. CCC only offers “Backup Everything” or “Incremental backup of selected items”. And you can choose to have any items that don’t exist on the source deleted from a previous backup. In my tests it’s a fairly good backup manager, and suitable for those who don’t want SuperDuper’s more advanced features like OS cloning and such. It’s also got a similar intuitive user interface although still not as good as SuperDuper. And best of all, it’s free.
I find SuperDuper (or Carbon Copy Cloner) is best used in conjunction with Time Machine, as both serve slightly different purposes (although John here in the comments seems to disagree much). I keep a sandboxed OS backed up over SuperDuper, while making sure the entire thing is restorable using Time Machine. Others would want a ready-to-go bootable backup of their hard drives in case of emergencies where the hard drive fails and one doesn’t have 3 hours to wait for Time Machine to do its thing. Or you might just want your home folder constantly backed up to a networked location.
In my tests, all three backup solutions were equally slow for the first round, until, SuperDuper 2.6.2 showed up. Now the initial backup is way faster than Time Machine or even Carbon Copy Cloner for that matter. Subsequent backups of all three are immaterial, since it mostly happens in the background.
•••
Chronosync
Kind of sitting in between local and over the air storage, Chronosync can make two locations into one, but over the same local network. If your goal is to have two copies of the same file across different Macs (or PCs), Chronosync is just the tool. Let’s take two machines, an iMac and a MacBook in my case. After installing the app on the iMac, I mounted the MacBook, and selected two folders for sync. “Documents” in this case. I then ran a ‘test sync’ which shows me what’s going to happen after I press the final sync button.
Data is immediately rushed across as fast as your network allows. Chronosync can be set for archiving (keeps adding new files to remote location) or 1:1 sync where it will delete any files not on the local location. This is great since if you’re always working on projects on your MacBook, but don’t want to have to carry around all your files, you can set it to archive with the iMac thereby having the new files as well as those you have deleted on your MacBook. You can of course use your imagination and mount PC hard drives from the den, use flash drives, or even have the same data on two partitions.
Chronosync costs $40 for a license, but you need a separate license for each machine. It doesn’t really matter since you can do a remote sync on a local machine (mount the MacBook drive on your Mac, and then go about syncing), but a single user license would have been a far better way to go about things. Now you would say, Applescript or even Automator would be able to full off this functionality. But rest assured it’s nowhere as elegant and intuitive as using a dedicated application like Chronosync. [Full review of ChronoSync 4.0]
•••
Next week we’ll take a look at over the air syncing, and then some cloud services. In the meantime, do let us know what’s your current backup strategy and how it’s working for you.
Updated post to correct factual errors, as pointed out in the comments.
