Time machine is a nice backup solution, but it isn’t complete.  The main issue I have with Time Machine is that it isn’t bootable.  This simply means that if your Mac crashed, you couldn’t plug in your backup and boot from it.  Your files are safe, but you couldn’t use your drive as a temporary workstation if you wanted to. 

That’s where Carbon Copy Cloner comes in! 

CCC, as it is sometimes abbreviated, does what it says it does: it clones that data on you Mac’s hard drive onto your backup drive.  Not only does this make the backup drive bootable, but also is handy for other reasons.  Since it backs up the whole drive, you don’t have to worry about if there are certain folders that you forgot to backup (like you would on Time Machine).  The interface is also clean, straightfoward, and easy to use.  The features you need are in the main window, but has the powerful features nicely placed under the hood.

There are other good backup programs, like SuperDuper, but CCC offers several features that many of these others make you pay to use, such as scheduled hourly and weekly backups.  Compare this to other programs that just wipe the drive, then recopy everything over again for their free versions. 

In future updates, I would like to see a couple other features from other backup programs added to CCC, like permission repairing before backing up.  Considering this has been a Mac favorite for years, I’m really thankful for it.  And it’s free!

You can download it from here:
bombich.com

Thanks for reading, and feel free to comment about what you use as backup program on your Mac.