Mountain Lion Time Machine or Carbon Copy Cloner???

I've been wondering what is better if there is such a thing. I have Mountain Lion and am backing up via Time Machine. I mainly want to do the obvious which is back up files on the iMac. More importantly... I have one of the recalled Seagate drives in the iMac and am wondering after taking it in...will i be able to boot up and restore from the the Time Machine backup?

From what I have read Carbon Copy Cloner does the same thing. Is there any advantage of one over the other?

TimeMachine is super basic, and backup app for the casual user. I'm not that versed in TimeMachine since I haven't used it in ages, so no clue if you can boot from it. It does one initial backup, then appends to that backup. It runs 24/7, verifying your drives every 12-15 minutes or so. Runs non-stop in the background.

There are three different things we're talking about here. Straight backup, append backup, cloning. Straight just backs up the drive's data (or specific files/folders). Append adds on to the backup only what has changed on the drive since the last backup. A clone is OS drive specific (in use) and can create a duplicate drive that will boot. A straight backup of your OS drive will not boot, as you can't just drag and drop the OS to another drive and expect it to work. It must be "blessed", permissions set properly, hidden files configured properly, etc. Which is what cloning does.

Carbon Copy Cloner is full featured backup software and can do it all. You can customize CCC and schedule it as you wish. There's nothing in the wold of backing up and archiving it can't do. And runs only when you launch it or schedule it to run.

Personally I use CCC, I don't like TM running 24/7 and not giving me checksum confirmations or allowing me the flexibility and scheduling I need from CCC. Plus, when it is time to increase the size of my OS drive, CCC makes it a snap.

One slight advantage to time machine is the ability to restore a single file or folder as it existed some time in the past. Once entered you can pick your file/folder and go backwards in time seeing the times when it changed.

It's only a slight advantage because time machine only keeps hourly backups for 24 hours. Daily backups are kept for 30 days. Weekly backups are kept until you run out of time machine disk space. That's not the same as seeing every version created over time which is, alas, sometimes what you want.

I use time machine. I also use Carbon Copy Cloner. CCC runs about 5 AM every morning to backup my system drive. That way if there is a failure I can be back up and running in a few minutes. I used time machine to restore old files... usually a case were I want to compare the current version of the file to one that existed earlier in time.

One slight advantage to time machine is the ability to restore a single file or folder as it existed some time in the past.

That actually is my main advantage of TimeMachine. Sometimes I need stuff from a couple of years back. With TM, it is a piece of cake to find it.

I have turned off the automatic, though, doing my backups manually.

Now THERE is a really sweet backup scheme! Bravo!

Yes, I agree. Time machine on a manual schedule works great for me. Either Super Duper or CCC for the OS drive backup.

marchyman has the best solution so far.