Backup and Cloning

ByMike Moffit

Backup is always an important subject that I discuss with my consulting clients. Time Machine is Apple’s built-in technology that backs up all your files, including multiple versions of files that have changed. You can restore your whole computer after a hard drive failure, or just restore individual files that may have been deleted.

I always recommend having an external hard drive or Time Capsule for Apple’s Time Machine backup, but some people want the extra protection of additional backups. There is a new option in OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, where you can use multiple drives for Time Machine, and it will alternate between them. This is a especially great for clients who want to backup at two locations, such as home and office, or primary home and vacation home.

Another popular backup option that can supplement Time Machine is a clone backup. A clone backup uses a extra hard drive to make an exact duplicate of a drive. The advantage is that you can boot from this drive in an emergency. However, clone backups are not meant to keep files that you have deleted, so you should also have a Time Machine backup on a different drive.

In the past I have almost always gone with SuperDuper! because of its easy interface and its Smart Update option, where the clone operation does not re-clone everything, but just updates the clone disk to match the current state of the original drive. Carbon Copy Cloner has always been another popular choice, and the new paid version has a great feature where it can also create a Recovery Partition on the clone drive, something that SuperDuper does not do. The Recovery Partition is a new feature in Lion and Mountain Lion where you can boot with the option key held down and boot from a special partition to run disk repair, OS reinstall, password reset and other options.

Whatever backup strategy you choose, just make sure you backup all of your disks! If you are using any external drives for extra storage, make sure those drives are backed up just like your internal drive!

Our consultants can help you choose what strategy to implement and can configure backup for all your computers, and even off-site network backup. See all of our consulting offerings here.

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