In my mind, SD, CCC, Time Machine are designed to be temporary backups. A substantial difference lies in doing an 'Archive' and a 'Back-Up' of file(s). Time Machine does some of both but in the end it does not provide a permanent copy of your files. I do both, having experienced the occasional hard drive failure, it is prudent to be overprotected! An end user can use any of these programs to accomplish either an 'Archive' or a 'Back-Up' but doing so may take a bit of work. :) Jens On Mar 26, 2009, at 11:59 AM, Charles Schneider wrote: > SuperDuper is a backup program. It makes an bootable backup of you > disk. Can't be much simpler than that. I think you are being a > little narrow minded to say a cloning program is not a method of > backing up data. > > > > Charlie Jens Selvig ...Lost in Montana...