Backup software for Mac

ipman3

Hi everyone (first post!) I am looking at decent backup software for the mac - any recommendations? There are so many programs and I wanted something simple and worth investing in, even better if free.  I know about time machine, but wanted to see if anyone knew of any alternatives.  Many thanks!

TadleyBaggie

Carbon Copy Cloner. 

zagubov

Another vote for Carbon Copy Cloner, backs up my hard drive and memory sticks on a monthly schedule.
Easy to use, inconspicuous, well worth the money spent.

tempus_fugit

How much is it? Checking the website as usual they want you to donwload a trial copy first and sign you up before telling you what the cost is.

ipman3

TadleyBaggie said:

Carbon Copy Cloner. 

zagubov said:

Another vote for Carbon Copy Cloner, backs up my hard drive and memory sticks on a monthly schedule.
Easy to use, inconspicuous, well worth the money spent.

Thats great - many thanks for the recommendation ill take a look, reasonably priced as well.  I wanted to backup my docs to my NAS drive, but the synology software on the NAS is just flaky and backs up when it fancies it :-D so nice to get something that works to a schedule.  Cheers for the advice!

zagubov

tempus_fugit said:

How much is it? Checking the website as usual they want you to donwload a trial copy first and sign you up before telling you what the cost is.

My OS version was so old I used an old version for free.
Finally got the most up-to-date version.
It might have been about £40 more or less. Very happy with it and it was worth the price IMHO.

a

You could try the free http://redorescue.com/

Sandtree

What is missing from TimeMachine that you want a third party solution?

datostar

Sandtree said:

What is missing from TimeMachine that you want a third party solution?

Good point. Combined with iCloud backups you won't lose much at all and with its hourly backups it's always current and you can extract individual files if necessary.  Drive clones as an when needed are better for a transfer to a new machine or to replace a failed drive. If you clone monthly that is in no sense an up to date backup.

Sandtree

Plus the backups are incremental so you can roll back to any point... though my reason for asking the question was less to highlight the benefits of TimeMachine but its difficult to recommend an alternative if you dont know what the issue the user is suffering in the first place... you don't go to your Dr and say you've had Paracetamol but now want a different drug and them then immediately recommend morphine without asking anything else. 

datostar

Sandtree said:

Plus the backups are incremental so you can roll back to any point... though my reason for asking the question was less to highlight the benefits of TimeMachine but its difficult to recommend an alternative if you dont know what the issue the user is suffering in the first place... you don't go to your Dr and say you've had Paracetamol but now want a different drug and them then immediately recommend morphine without asking anything else. 

Belt and braces in my case now since I had the internal 5400rpm boot drive just about fail completely on my iMac with numerous bad sectors making it even slower (20 minutes boot up. It now runs from an external SSD. Rebuilding the system was very tedious. I now have Acronis True Image and Time Machine backing up to separate drives. Acronis is very flexible and I have it do an incremental system backup twice daily with the recovery option which makes the drive bootable via a separate partition.