But Wait a second!!!!! Stop the Presses!!!!!!! Why did it take this long for someone to answer the question I posted, I don’t even remember when.

Alistar said
“You can apply TM updates to update your bootable clone, too.”

The issue I keep bringing up is that a TM backup is more up to date than a SD backup so normally it would be better for me to restore from TM so I’m back to where I was instead of loosing a days worth of work to get back up to where my last SD backup was. From everything I could tell about SD it appeared that you couldn’t use TM to update your SD Restore without doing a full TM restore (which saves you nothing). So how does this work? Can you just select your Home Folder and click restore? and everything is back in sync?

I truly appreciate the intellectual banter, but actual new knowledge is oh so much better still.

Well I think I owe you a drink Doug for sticking with the argument so doggedly!

I think all of us do! Doug has really proven himself, and it’s almost a year since we published this one. Thanks Doug! (And thanks Alistair as well, for remembering to post the real world ‘test’)

Now to fomulate some points to counter Doug’s arguments once and for all

To respond to your points - the external drive is big enough, but I would have had to repartition it on the fly if it was just a TM backup. It’s also difficult to keep booting off an external drive and keep your TM backup up to date on the same drive.

SD backups aren’t particularly time consuming once the initial backup is done, it takes about 10 - 20 mins for the daily update. You can apply TM updates to update your bootable clone, too.

I can see I’m not going to change your mind, but I’m pretty happy with my setup and I think now it’s been battle tested, I’m sticking with it. But good luck to you and I hope you never need to test your setup in anger.

You obviously own an external drive large enough to restore your iMac’s data (you are using it for SD). If you spent 1/100th of the time you do with SD backups you could have kept that drive up to date with the current OS releases. On the failure you could have booted your macbook from that drive, TS restored and been in the same place you were with SD. Then when your iMac came back your new TS backup could be restored back to the iMac instead of restoring with SD.

The advantage SD gives you is it is a little faster for that initial restore but the downside is it is almost definitely a more out of date backup (unless you are doing hourly SD backups).

So, assuming daily SD backups, is the 1-24 hours of work lost sense your SD backup worth the 30min to 1 hour you loose in time doing your restore?

Makes you think.

For the record, I used my (SuperDuper created) bootable backup to run through my Macbook, worked like a charm. The when the iMac came back I copied the data back. My point is that I didn’t turn to the TM backup once, it would have taken too long to re-create the data and my Macbook doesn’t have enough space.

From this experience:
1) Bootable backups are essential for catastrophic failure;
2) SuperDuper works as advertised and kept me going through the fortnight of iMac-less existence;
3) Time Machine wouldn’t have worked in my situation not without extra expense and a lot of time.

I (now) have a Time Capsule, but still believe TM is good for smaller failures (file corruption, accidental deletion etc.).

Can’t comment on Snapshot.