Recently I fired up my MacBook Air, and it faithfully reminded me that I've been derelict in my duties, and haven't backed up to Time Machine in 20 days. Can't have that, so I plugged in an external drive and cranked TM up. Two hours later it was done. Hmmm! Had that much changed in 20 days on my Mac, I wondered? Anyway, this reminded me of another backup duty. About two or three months ago I did a clone of the entire SSD on my Air to another external drive using the program Super Duper. Plugged in this external drive and did a 'smart backup' of the SSD using Super Duper. Twenty minutes later it was done. Hmmm! Smart Backup only captures items that have changed since I did the last backup. When it was done I had, again, a bootable, 100% clone of everything on the SSD -- just in case the drive should ever fail.

I wondered why Apple's engineers hadn't designed Time Machine to use the same approach. Would be a lot quicker doing a backup. Then, I thought, perhaps they were thinking of a desktop Mac (which was the original design concept), where one can leave an external drive plugged in all the time, and Time Machine turned on all the time. But this concept doesn't work so well with a laptop. It's a bit of a hassle to grab an external drive, plug it in to my laptop, and do a backup. I've been using a Mac for slightly over 20 years and have never used Time Machine once to retrieve a lost document or photo or whatever. Not once. Also, in the same time frame, I've never used Super Duper to recover a dead optical drive or SSD. And for this, I'm happy. Buying the program Super Duper is kinda like buying a life insurance policy. You may be glad you did, but you're in no hurry to use it.

Jim Hamm