One of the worst feelings in the world for any PC or Mac user is the dreaded error message on Boot-up stating your hard drive has failed. Putting your trust in hardware (despite its age) is foolish to say the least. We are all guilty of it, including myself.
OS X has a pretty impressive backup utility built in as standard TimeMachine which is even capable of doing offline backups. However, TimeMachine won’t help you if your entire OS fails to boot.
But don’t reach for your wallet just yet the boffins over at Bombich have been hard at work updating their flagship backup application Carbon Copy Cloner, which now fully supports OS X Lion. Which not only creates backups (full and incremental) of all of your data, but is also capable of creating recovery boot disks, containing your OS and all of your backed up files!
Carbon Copy Cloner has a long list of features, most of which wouldn’t look out of place in a commercial and expensive backup solution. Carbon Copy Cloner has been designed as shareware, but has not been crippled in anyway. The only thing you will notice on the ‘free’ version is the inclusion of a banner add, much like the one in the screenshot above. However they have been tastefully placed to ensure they don’t hinder your cloning experience. You can however get rid of the advertising banners simply by making a donation to it’s ongoing development.
I recommend using both TimeMachine and Carbon Copy Cloner to my fellow mac users, to ensure an issue free restoration should the need ever occur.
Once Carbon Copy Cloner has been configured to your liking you really can set it up and forget it, as it’s scheduled backups will incrementally keep your backup file up to date.
You can download Carbon Copy Cloner direct from Bombich’s website by clicking this direct link.