#Carbon copy cloner vs crashplan mac#

While this fixes two of the limitations of Time Machine, it's not cheap compared to other online backup services: while Dolly Drive will cost $20 per month for a 500GB drive, Crashplan would do the same job for $5 per month. Dolly Drive integrates with Time Machine to allow you to back up to the internet rather than a local hard drive, and, through its own application, create a fully bootable clone of your drive at the same time.

One other interesting option is to use a service that integrates with Time Machine to provide an online version of your regular backup. And some services will make a copy of your backup and ship it to you on a hard drive or DVD. Because most internet connections are asynchronous - faster pulling data down from the net than sending it - it will be a lot quicker than your initial backup, but might still take a day or longer to complete.īut, of course, you can be absolutely sure that you will have a copy of your data to restore, which isn't the case if you only have a local backup.

#Carbon copy cloner vs crashplan mac#

The speed issue doesn't just affect backing up, of course - if your Mac goes down, then you'll need to wait for your data to be restored too. Your machine will need to be online all that time, and if you have any kind of cap on the amount of data you can use, you're probably going to bust right through it. If you're backing up an entire hard drive with a few hundred gigabytes of data, that first backup might take a couple of days or longer to complete.

First, and probably the most annoying, is that no matter how fast your computer and connection are, the initial backup will take a very long time. However, all online services have a few disadvantages. And they tend to perform poorly with large single files, such as an Aperture library, where the file is often changed quicker than it can be backed up. Because they are constantly syncing files as soon as they are changed, they can use up more bandwidth than dedicated backup services, which might only look for changes once a day. Sync services like these are convenient, especially if you have multiple Macs, but they do have some inherent drawbacks. Although Dropbox only works with a dedicated single folder, SugarSync can be set up to synchronise any set of folders on your hard drive, which means you don't have to change the places you store your data.