I'm a big fan of SuperDuper [1]. I use it for daily differential backups to a secondary SSD. I don't get the hourly backups that TimeMachine has, but my SuperDuper backups are directly bootable in the event that my system disk dies.

I'm sure you could do the same with cron and rsync, but I can't be bothered.

[1] https://shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.ht...

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Marsymars an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> I don't get the hourly backups that TimeMachine has, but my SuperDuper backups are directly bootable in the event that my system disk dies.

Well as long as Apple hasn’t broken that with an update: https://www.shirtpocket.com/blog/index.php/shadedgrey/youre_...

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ndegruchy 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This has been on my to-buy list for a while. Something I should probably do, because while recovery from the built-in recovery interface is fine, having an offline bootable backup is also great. It also doesn't interfere with having Time Machine be the "standard" backup.

I could probably setup a calendar appointment to dump a bootable image once a month to an external disk.

	▲	maxkfranz 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You can just use the UI to make whatever schedule you want (monthly, daily, every Monday, etc.). I think it edits your crontab behind the scenes. I set it to daily, but you could set whatever you want. You can even have multiple schedule entries, similar to cron. Edit: Yeah, the bootable backups have saved me more than once. It's great to just be able to keep working even when the system disk is kaput.