Time Machine debates: Time Machine vs. other solutions

This week we have touched on a few of the hotly debated topics regarding Apple's Time Machine backup solution. So far, the biggest questions have been the proper size of drive to use for Time Machine, and ways to secure your backups from unauthorized access. Today, we'll discuss our last topic in this series regarding Time Machine, which is to compare and contrast it with other backup solutions, and briefly outline what might be best for an individual's uses.

Time Machine

Time Machine has been widely accepted because, for one thing, it comes with the operating system and is well-advertised, but is also very robust. It is an all-inclusive system that will by default back up every file on attached local disks, and as such creates a set-and-forget system that is appealing to home users. People don't have to worry about managing their backups by installing software and worrying about compatibility, and then dealing with extensive configuration and backup schemes. With Time Machine, you plug a drive in and it works.

Beyond the ease of setup, the Time Machine drive is actively indexed and easily searchable, and backups run every hour the computer is awake to ensure an adequate history of backups is available. Therefore, you will only have up to 60 minutes of work loss in the event of a major crash or other data loss.

Time Machine does have its drawbacks, which are that the backups are not bootable and it is not very configurable. If your system crashes and you need to continue working, Time Machine requires you to perform a full system restore, which can take hours. Apple's strive for simplicity with Time Machine has also made it rather difficult to suit all users. Some people may wish to have it run at a different interval than the hourly backups, and while this can be done, it takes using third-party utilities or command-line editing to work.

If you are primarily interested in a history of backups, and maintaining an active workflow comes secondary, then Time Machine is a good and convenient solution.

Cloning

Cloning offers some of the options that Time Machine does not, including the ability to boot immediately to the clone and continue work in the event of a boot drive failure. The problem with cloning is that it does not have any history of backups, so you cannot follow file version changes or retrieve files that were lost before the latest backup was done.

Cloning programs are highly configurable, both because third-party applications have extensive scheduling, and because Apple's solution with disk utility can also be implemented into user-defined scripts since it is available as a command-line utility.

If you are primarily interested in maintaining workflow and being able to immediately boot in the event of a hardware failure, then implementing a cloning solution is a good idea.

For more information about cloning solutions, check out our recent article on implementing cloning in OS X.

Other backup solutions

There are a variety of third-party history-based backup solutions that you can try besides Time Machine. One of the most commonly used is Retrospect, which has been around for years, and has survived by offering more versatility than Apple's solution, such as highly configurable scheduling, file inclusion and exclusion, and media support. Retrospect and similar solutions are very similar to Time Machine, but for the most part seem to be more suited for enterprise environments than home uses.

Additional third-party alternatives to Time Machine are file synchronization solutions. While not exactly backup solutions, these software packages synchronize files on your computer to other locations, and therefore provide multiple copies of a single file that can be used as backups. The strive for synchronization these days is to propagate changes as quickly as possible (using "push" technologies, etc.) and that can cause a missing file to be almost immediately deleted from the synchronized locations. However, if you have it set up to run on a daily basis, then you should be able to retrieve a lost document from a synchronized location before synchronization runs again.

Lastly, you can tackle hardware failures by implementing a mirrored RAID solution, which is similar to having an immediately synchronized clone. You can set up a RAID solution with hardware controllers, but also do this in software. Read more in our recent article on implementing RAID in OS X.

Our recommendation

We've mentioned in past articles that there is nothing stopping anyone from using the best of both worlds and implementing multiple backup schemes for data. We recommend that people use one history-based backup system such as Time Machine, and also regularly clone their boot drives using Disk Utility or a third-party cloning utility. With this setup, you should be able to quickly boot from the cloned disk in the event of a hard-drive failure and continue working, but still be able to browse through file changes over time with Time Machine.

These days, backup solutions have become quite easy to implement, and can be fun to set up. If you are not backing up your files in any way, you are risking data and productivity loss. Given the cheapness of external drives these days, we strongly urge every user to take advantage of the powerful backup solutions available and safeguard their data.

Resources