One of my granddaughters, nicknamed "Kichan," is in college, majoring in graphic arts. Kichan makes heavy use of Photo Shop & other graphics arts software. Right now all her classes enable students to back-up data files, drawings, etc, to online storage. However, she has never backed up her Macbook's system (image/clone/etc). Kichan is very skilled in using apps to do all kinds of amazing art, animations, ad layouts, website designs, etc -- but she is untaught concerning possibilities such as BSOD, drive failure, locked-up computer, infections, etc. So, in the 2 years or so since I gave her the Macbook, she has never backed-up her Macbook's system. Fortunately, the Macbook has never needed one. My plan is to (a) get her a good imaging app for the Mac, & (b) get her TWO EACH of this Samsung's rugged, portable SSD with 2 TB (it has options for 1 or 2 or 4 TB). REQUEST: I will be VERY grateful for any & all advice and comments. I especially need recommendations for good user-friendly apps for doing full system backups on a Macbook. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ BIG thanks to @ProTruckDriver for mentioning Time Machine. Yes, the backup app MUST be able to create bootable back-ups. If there is a system failure, one cannot use that broken system to restore itself.
You have the built in "Time Machine" on every Mac but it's not bootable. Clone and Bootable that I know of are: Carbon Copy Cloner: https://bombich.com/ SuperDuper: https://www.shirt-pocket.com/
You can restore Time Machine backups without booting into macOS. https://www.howtogeek.com/356063/ho...-from-a-time-machine-backup-in-recovery-mode/
bellgamin, At the moment I use Carbon Copy Cloner as ProTruckDriver has mentioned and the backup can boot off an external hard drive. Not sure of the Mac OS your granddaughter is using but in the past i have used: Backup and Recovery for Mac – Paragon Software Group (paragon-software.com) Paragon Hard Disk Manager for Mac | Paragon Software (paragon-software.com) Mac Backup Software | OS X Clone, Sync, and Snapshots (macdaddy.io) Note: some of these apps may not work for the latest version of Mac OS. Regards.
Are you sure this behaviour will change if you buy her some software/hardware? You might want to consider a "set and forget" solution that automatically makes backups to the cloud instead? Example: Backblaze.
This is exactly what I would suggest, in this case cloud based back up makes much more sense. I'm also quite bad in making back ups, it's too much work for me, but I do it once in a while. With that I mean, I copy my most important data to my external SSD. But I'm seriously thinking about starting to use a cloud based service like Google Drive or Dropbox, I think this is much more safe. And nowadays most people over here have download and upload speeds of at least 100Mbps, so this shouldn't be a problem either.