My internal 512 GB SSD on my 2012 iMac went belly up yesterday, and trustworthy CCC was there to save the day. Carbon Copy Cloner has saved my butt so many times, I've lost count. My setup is simple; I have CCC backing up my entire internal hard drive to a 1TB external drive every 3AM, and it just sits there doing it's thing day after day. If the internal drive goes bust, the external drive automatically boots up and CCC prompts me to restore the errant internal drive. 4 to 6 hours later, everything is back to normal (the restore completes, and I can then reboot into the internal drive and get back to work). Effortless, but a bit time consuming. CCC support says that a faster external (SSD) would help, but you can expect to have a Mac out of commission for 4 to 6 hours if your main drive fails. Compare that to Time Machine's 36-hour restore over wifi or 12-hour restore when directly connected to a Time Capsule. I'd go with CCC, and just schedule jobs for whatever drives you need backed up, then forgettaboutit.
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Carbon Copy Cloner has saved my butt a few times, too. I keep two separate clones for my 2012 iMac's 500GB internal SSD, and two separate clones for my 2012 i7 MacBook Pro. (All of my clone drives are 1TB HDDs 7,200 rpm/128MB caches.)
[Incidentally, I'm not quite completely on board with SSDs for my clone drives because, 1) HDD technology is still
improving, and powering them on and using them for only 2-4 hours per week, those drives should reasonably be able to stand up to many, many years of reliable use. 2) SSDs running over a USB 3 bus doesn't deliver any of the appreciable speed gains you get on a SATA bus, and 3) SSD longevity has yet to prove itself comparable to that of old-fashioned HDDs. I formerly had two 1TB SSDs in my MBP as RAID 0. They got flaky and gave up the ghost in less than 3 years. Fortunately, they were under warranty, and I since placed them in a Thunderbolt 3 enclosure as a RAID 0 and sold it to a friend who's into heavy-duty video stuff. I've replaced the optical drive and installed a 6G 500GB SSD as my startup drive for the MBP.]
I don't run backups every day, perhaps only twice a week, but given that most of my ongoing work resides on my iCloud drive (at least while it's in progress), I don't have enough changes to my systems to warrant doing so more often.
I'm curious about which approach you use when running CCC, which I only recently became aware of.
There's the straight-up cloning which creates a _CCC SafetyNet folder at the root level of the clone drive and contains all the files moved/altered/deleted/etc. from the last time you previously backed up, or
The "Snapshot" method, wherein CCC takes — wait for it — a "snapshot" of your system from which you can do a restore. I didn't know about this "method" and still don't exactly know how it works, and being the fuddy-duddy I am, I don't trust it, and I've been either too busy or too lazy to investigate it further.
I do know the "snapshot" thing seems to take up far less space because it doesn't create the _CCC SafetyNet folder. That being said, I turned this option on without realizing it worked the way it does, and I've since turned it off.
The reason I'm a fan of the SafetyNet folder is that I have instant access to anything I may have deleted and want back, or to see previous versions of files I've since worked on. Given over time, the SafetyNet folder will grow quite large. But by the time I've filled up 75% of my clone drive, I can go into the SafetyNet folder and selectively trash the really old stuff I'm confident I'll never need again.
In the very likely event I'm walking about in public with my head ensconced in my butt due to ignorance, I'd really appreciate hearing what I may either be missing out on or simply don't understand.
