Originally Posted by
bocastephen
So, I need an alternative - but a disk cloner is not going to work for me because I might need to fish out and recover individual files to restore instead of the entire drive.
Carbon Copy Cloner does both things. You can pick out specific files or use it to boot your machine if your original drive fails, etc. But CCC doesn't support the whole Time Machine "give me the version from two weeks ago, not yesterday" concept. And Time Machine is free, but CCC is $40. I use it on the road with a portable 1GB drive and it has saved my butt twice.