Captain Raptor by Kevin O'Malley

It's hard to beat comic books about an armor wearing, spaceship flying dinosaur.

Carbon Copy Cloner

After fighting with Time Machine a few hours tonight and getting to the point where it looked like I would need to wipe my drive and start all over again, I decided to find a different solution for backing up my Mac. So, I checked out Super Duper! and Carbon Copy Cloner.

They're both great applications, but the fact that Carbon Copy Cloner has most of the paid features of Super Duper! for free (with a donation request attached) settled it for me. I'm now doing incremental backups of my drive as a bootable image, rather than Time Machine's recoverable, but not bootable, backup format.

Troubleshooting Time Machine Backups Failures

Every once in a while I'll bump into an issue where Time Machine backups fail, and usually once that happens the problem won't resolve itself when I run the backup again. So, here's what to do when that happens. First, run the following in Terminal:

sudo grep backupd /var/log/system.log

You should see something about the backup failing and the error number. Here's my latest error:

Google the error (there are quite a few of them that can come up), and usually that will tell you how to resolve your problem.