For help, advice and discussion about stuff not related to aviation. Play nice: no religion, no politics and no axe grinding please.
#1618590
Paranoid or not, I learnt recently that even this is not bullet proof; recently I inadvertently deleted an entry in Contacts, so a few days later I tried winding back the clock within Time Machine, but discovered that this didn't work. Maybe iCloud sync doesn't play as nicely with Time Machine as one might have expected...
#1618617
After the occasional Mac failure over the years, and having used TimeMachine to back up, it can still take a while to be up and running again, especially if you are in the middle of a job. Computers always fail at the most inappropriate time! So I have been using Carbon Copy Clone (CCC) as my primary back up. This has been a godsend more than once. I just plug my CCC back up drive into pretty much any another Mac, restart using the CCC as the start up drive and you are immediately using 'your' mac again - in the meantime, you can take your time to get the original machine fixed. Still using Time Machine, great for setting up a new/re-formatted machine, but CCC gets you out of the poo.
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By stevelup
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1618620
Yes, bootable backups are an absolute joy, and they're remarkably hardware agnostic.

You can plug your backup drive into pretty much any Mac and be back up and running.

I don't use Time Machine anymore as CCC now supports snapshot backups, so you get the best of both worlds by just using CCC.
#1618621
Thanks Mr Bags.

The failure does have me presently looking at additional back up options, particularly in view of the noises from the Time Capsule.

CCC does appear to be a very useful tool, however SWMBO does have a need for a PC (actually the courier has about 20mins to deliver before we have to go out) and so CCC probably isn't the correct option.

Excluding iPads/Pods and Android phones we have my MacBook Pro, an iMac and a PC laptop to back up.

For various reasons, including lack of control and upload speed, I don't favour the Cloud.

Any recommendations appreciated. :thumleft:
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By stevelup
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1618622
I must be misunderstanding but I can't understand what the relevance of the PC is here in relation to CCC?

For 'online' backups, CCC will backup to any network drive. For your bootable backup, you would physically attach the drive.

CCC is just a supplement or possibly alternative to Time Machine.
By riverrock
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1618707
I have media backed up to a portable hard disk and copied across 2 laptops. Photos are backed up within Flickr and Google Photos.
Documents are synchronised to One Drive and Google Drive.
The sync means that three laptops end up with all of the files on them as well as the cloud. The cloud services mean I can access all my documents on my phone if need be. Both system contain a history of changes to files.

I have a minor issue in that Google drive and One Drive occasionally fight over updates (creating duplicates) but that isn't the end of the world.

So far my wife and I have never lost anything...
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By JonathanB
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1618724
I use TimeMachine to a D-Link 320L Sharecenter NAS which has two 3Tb disks in RAID1 configuration. But it is occasionally a bit flakey - I had to re-share everything recently and had to restart my timemachine backup from scratch onto it. (The old backup is still there, and I'm sure could be recovered if required).

I probably should sort something else as well!
#1618784
stevelup wrote:I must be misunderstanding but I can't understand what the relevance of the PC is here in relation to CCC?

I understand CCC is Mac only?

Ideally I'd like to have a common system across 3 machines backing up wirelessly to something similar to the Time Capsule. At present the Macs back up to the TC and the PC is backed up manually to a connected HD.