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Backup Utility Smackdown (OS X)
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NewsPoster
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Apr 16, 2015, 07:15 AM
 
This is a rubbish smackdown. Where's the drama? Where's the bit where one of these backup utilities gets voted off the island? Here's the thing, though: over the last month or so, we've reviewed three very powerful applications that broadly do the same thing. They all back up your data to external hard disks, and they all create ways that you can startup your Mac again even if your internal drive dies on you. Carbon Copy Cloner, SuperDuper, and ChronoSync are surely the leading applications in this, and they are certainly needed. We just wouldn't be doing our job if we didn't pitch them against each other to help you pick one.

You wouldn't have imagined that backing up would be such a big field: three competing products in a niche that, frankly, you likely do not spend all day thinking about. You need to think about it a little, though, as of course without backing up your data, your data is going to vanish on you one day. However, if you have a Mac, then you have Time Machine, which is easy: plug in an external drive and off it goes. If you do already think a lot about protecting your data from calamitous loss, then you may have already gone for an online backup service like Backblaze or CrashPlan or IDrive.

So it may seem odd that there can even be enough business going round for these three firms to do well. Yet they each survive, they each continue to be developed, they are each well-supported and liked. It's a measure of how important their job is: how important, and how useful.

They're so important that we are most definitely arguing that you need one of them. In addition to Time Machine. It's just a question of which.



If you currently do not have your work being backed up at all, then stop reading: the answer is that any of these three will make you happy, any of the three will do a great job, so just go get one right now.

They each do the most important jobs of backing up your data, but they do vary. They vary by how quickly and easily you can pick up how to use them, plus they vary by how powerful they are. Despite being such similar products, they also rather aim at different audiences -- and therefore concentrate their fire, so to speak, on different issues.

Carbon Copy Cloner feels to us like it's designed primarily to get on with the job of backing up quickly. Here's what you're backing up, here's where you're backing it up to, go. There's more to it than that, but not more that you have to understand and setup before you use this. It may be telling that when we had a real-life need to quickly back up a failing drive after the three reviews were done, it was Carbon Copy Cloner we used.

If that's not a vote for Carbon Copy Cloner, we don't know what is. However, using it again like that did raise an issue we hadn't foreseen during the proper review we did last month: for some reason, possibly the impending drive failure, Carbon Copy Cloner took longer to back up this time than it had before. Same Mac, same external drive, approximately the same amount of data, but nearly double the time.

For now, we'll put that down to how our hard drive seriously needed backing up before it went any more wrong but still, Carbon Copy Cloner does not win out for speed. That doesn't concern us in the slightest when we're solely doing one Mac, but if you have to do several, it'll be an issue.



If you do have to backup many Macs, then the one you need is ChronoSync. It is the fastest of the three, and it also has features that specifically help managers who are controlling lots of machines. With great speed and a big feature list comes complexity, though. Add in the fact that you can remotely check up on the progress of your backup, and while you're at it send and receive files from the Mac back in your office, and ChronoSync is clearly a professional tool.

That's not knocking Carbon Copy Cloner, nor is it praising ChronoSync. For ChronoSync needs studying: the more time you spend with this one, the more time it will save you later -- if you need its myriad features. Like all of these, the tasks it handles do include scheduled backups: you can decide to have it run weekly, daily, hourly or so on. However, you can also set up rules.

Tell ChronoSync to only backup Photoshop files created since last week's backup. Make up a tag for your files like 'Urgent" and tell ChronoSync to backup any thing tagged that way before it does everything else. There is serious power and serious ability to fiddle in ChronoSync, and while our review examined them, our only real criticism is about how that plethora of options is a barrier to the more casual user. Those same options, plus the ease of using this across many, many machines and controlling that remotely is manna to network managers.



So if our rough, totally unfair, watercooler-conversation kind of smackdown sounds as if we think Carbon Copy Cloner is for new users and ChronoSync for experienced ones, that must mean SuperDuper! is in the middle. It is, and it isn't. Perhaps it's a scintilla harder to learn than Carbon Copy Cloner, and certainly it is aimed at individuals instead of giant multi-computer companies. However, it has the appearance of being straightforward, yet it also comes with what our review called specialized features, such as sandboxing, that are great for people testing and retesting software.

The more you think about backups, then the more you realize how important this is, and so it becomes less surprising that three contenders can be thriving away in it. What's maybe still surprising and frankly unhelpful is that all three have such a mix of broad appeal and specific strengths that we recommend any and all of them.

That means this is less a smackdown, and more a sit down with a nice cup of tea, but we're okay with that. If you're in a hurry, just go buy one of them for yourself -- and the fact that it's for yourself, and you're in a hurry, tells us you urgently need backup -- and that Carbon Copy Cloner is your best bet. Backups are so important that if you then go on to buy one of the others as well, that's still money wisely spent.

SuperDuper requires OS X 10.6 or later, and costs $28 direct from the official website. Carbon Copy Cloner works with Mac OS 10.6 or higher -- version 3.5.7 is compatible with 10.6 through 10.9, while version 4 is compatible with 10.8 through 10.10. Regardless of which version you need, it costs $40 from the official website. ChronoSync is $50 from its official site, but offer free lifetime upgrades -- something neither of the other two do. All three offer trial versions as well.

-- William Gallagher (@WGallagher)
( Last edited by NewsPoster; May 1, 2015 at 01:01 AM. )
     
Inkling
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Apr 16, 2015, 08:42 AM
 
Which you choose matters less than picking one and using it. SuperDuper saved me untold hours when my hard drive started to die a few years back. I quickly copied the InDesign document I was working on to a flash drive, then the hard drive was gone. Ten minutes later I'd restarted off my backup drive, moved that document onto it and was back at work. That one event paid its cost many times over.
Author of Untangling Tolkien and Chesterton on War and Peace
     
Wisterley
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Apr 16, 2015, 09:27 AM
 
I'm curious why any of these are better than Time Capsule.
     
JeffHarris
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Apr 16, 2015, 09:39 AM
 
@Wisterly...
Time Capsule is for Time Machine backups, which are incremental. Time Machine backups used in combination with these utilities work very well together.

These utilities allow you to clone (make an exact, bit for bit copy) your boot drive (or any other drive). So, in an emergency you can boot from a cloned drive if the original craps out, or you need to run diagnostics on it (like Disk Warrior), or you're replacing/upgrading a drive. It makes the process much simpler, with much less probability of making a mistake.

I use a RAID for Time Machine backups and a partitioned Thunderbolt drive for SuperDuper! cloned hard drives.
     
DiabloConQueso
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Apr 16, 2015, 09:43 AM
 
ChronoSync allows me to synchronize, backup, and mirror non-OS, external hard drives, on my schedules, even across a network -- something that Time Machine cannot do, or cannot do easily via the built-in Time Machine GUI.

Both CCC and SuperDuper! have done well for me in the "bootable clone" category, and I couldn't live without ChronoSync -- it's the bee's knees when it comes to complex, scheduled mirrors, synchronizations, and backups.

For any run-of-the-mill home user with a single, internal hard drive, Time Machine takes care of nearly 100% of their needs. For those of us with more complex, multi-drive setups and networks, we need something more robust than Time Machine.
     
James Katt
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Apr 16, 2015, 09:53 AM
 
TURNING OFF PRESCANNING will double the speed of Carbon Copy Cloner. Prescanning is used primarily for setting up accurate progress bars for the user. But if you just want to get it done quickly, turning off Prescanning will get the job done much faster.
     
James Katt
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Apr 16, 2015, 09:59 AM
 
For managing multiple whole-drive bootable backups which are set to run at a set time or as needed, Carbon Copy Cloner is simply the best. It manages the recovery partition better than ChronoSync. ChronoSync's list of backups also doesn't show the entire name of the file - a huge flaw for usability.
For managing backups of individual folders across drives and networks, ChronoSync is simply better than the others. I use if for hourly backups of folders.
SuperDuper! is clearly showing its age. I stopped using it years ago. Carbon Copy Cloner and ChronoSync are simply much better than SuperDuper! The developer stopped improving the interface of SuperDuper! years ago which is a shame.
     
mdirvin
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Apr 16, 2015, 10:52 AM
 
On reason to not use Time Machine is if you backup to a stripped raid unit. TM creates a sparse bundle, the data in the sparse bundle will not be rebuilt after a disk failure. I tested it on my NAS unit by pulling one of the disks and replacing it with a spare. I use ChronoSync because it will back up over a network, something the other two would not do last time I check, admittedly that was a while back. I really like the archive feature that allows me to keep deleted versions. Which is a good system when using non native formatted HD's for backup.
     
DiabloConQueso
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Apr 16, 2015, 12:13 PM
 
A disk failure in a striped array will always kill the data on the entire array, unless you've got mirroring, redundancy, and/or parity as well (RAID1+0, RAID0+1, RAID5, etc.).

A simple and straight RAID 0 setup will never survive even so much as a single disk failure. Could that be why the sparsebundle was corrupt?
     
coffeetime
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Apr 16, 2015, 03:10 PM
 
I use Retrospect for Mac desktop. It's my most reliable backup since the 90s.
     
mdirvin
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Apr 16, 2015, 03:47 PM
 
Obviously it will be save on a mirrored raid, since there is a duplicate copy. However it will not be rebuilt on a stripped raid with parity. i.e. raid 5, or 6. I was using raid 5 for the when I ran the test, replacing the one disk with a spare. The raw data on the shares was rebuilt just as expected. However the sparse bundle did not contain any data, all the data contained within was lost.
     
cvbcvb
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Apr 17, 2015, 01:00 AM
 
What are the software options for incremental backups to Blu-ray media? Don't ask why...
     
mdirvin
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Apr 17, 2015, 08:08 AM
 
Originally Posted by cvbcvb View Post
What are the software options for incremental backups to Blu-ray media? Don't ask why...
From my experience thats a real problem. I back up to a NAS unit that has a Linux HD format. Any program that uses hard links, alias's, or some kind of pointer will not work. The first back up is good, then the second just generates 1000's of error messages. ChronoSync will do something like an incremental backup, it can be set up to move deleted, or changed files to a archive folder. That way it doesn't create links, pointers, or alias's. Works great on non-native formatted HD's. The other backup program that I found to work with a non-native format was Profsoft engineering Data Backup 3. It will also do incremental backup's apparently without using pointers, alias's, or links. How it works I don't know since it uses hidden files. That is the main reason that I don't use it. One requirement for me is to be able to restore using the "drag & drop" method. I don't like the idea of having to install software to restore data stored in a hidden file. I am assuming you are talking about R/W blue ray disk. Each of these have a free trial, you could download and give them a try.

Mike
     
Mike Wuerthele
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Apr 17, 2015, 09:09 AM
 
Originally Posted by cvbcvb View Post
What are the software options for incremental backups to Blu-ray media? Don't ask why...
Wow. That's a tough one.

Retrospect should do it. Check your drive here, first, though.

Retrospect
     
cvbcvb
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Apr 17, 2015, 04:11 PM
 
Data Backup 3 does not work with Blu-ray media... I'll investigate Retrospect further. Thanks
     
cvbcvb
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Apr 17, 2015, 04:34 PM
 
Not looking good for Mac Retrospect and Blu-ray:
Panasonic SW-5582 Panasonic ATAPI Blu-ray In Process
Panasonic SW-5583 Panasonic Serial-ATA Blu-ray Not Tested
Panasonic SW-5584 Panasonic Serial-ATA Blu-ray Not Tested
Plextor PX-B900A Plextor ATAPI Blu-ray No Support
     
just a poster
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Apr 18, 2015, 02:54 AM
 
just use rsync. It's all some of these utilities are using beneath their skins anyway.
     
panjandrum
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Apr 21, 2015, 10:41 AM
 
Just a quick word of warning about Retrospect: Don't rely on it. Decades ago, in the age of 4mm and 8mm dat tapes and the like it was the go-to, but it's been unreliable since at least the dawn of OS X. You just can't count on it to be able to restore your data when you need it. You can accomplish much the same thing using Time Machine and Carbon Copy Cloner to make network backups and clones. (Use Mac OS X Server as a time-machine "server" for reliability). You can even clone over a network using CCC directly to another drive or partition if using disk-images isn't good enough for you. For example, I often setup small businesses or school so that their mission-critical systems are cloned every night over the network by CCC to either a large external drive (on a "backup server" for lack of a better term) which has been partitioned so that each mission-critical machine has a dedicated partition, or alternately to smaller individual external drives (my preferred method). All these systems also backup via. Time-Machine (also over the network to a different drive array connected to the same backup server) In the event of catastrophic failure any of these mission-critical machines can be back up and running from a clone made the night before (can even hook the drive to a different Mac of-course). Then a restore of certain bits of data edited that day can be restored with Time-Machine if necessary. Wham-bam and within 15 or 20 minutes the user is back and working again.
     
akphoto
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Dec 11, 2015, 08:53 PM
 
Buyer beware of Super Duper. If the software doesn't work for you, you cannot get a refund. I bought it to create a custom script to skip some directories (CCC doesn't need a custom script to exclude corrupt files), I was able to create the custom script but was unable to use it due to the failing hard drive I was recovering data from. After not being able to figure it out after hours of trying I asked for a refund and was refused. It hadn't even been 24 hours.

CCC was able to do what Super Duper couldn't on the first try, no hassle, no scripts, no re-installs, no force quits. I didn't even have to pay for it although I'd gladly pay for CCC if I need it again. Super duper is in the business of bad business practices. BUYER BEWARE!!
     
   
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