Without going into detail, I lost a number of files from my MB recently.

I ran Data Rescue 4 and managed to recover most of them, although none were visible on any drive or using any search means.

Highly recommend this software for the time you never want to have, but know sometime you will.

What about Time Machine? Just regular make backups and no worries any more.

What about Time Machine? Just regular make backups and no worries any more.

I've never liked TM. First, it takes an entire backup disc and fills it endlessly, only overwriting once the disc is full.

I also did a number of years back have some trouble trying to recover files and TM just kept freezing.

I'll stay with CCC which I feel I have much better control over.

But if you lose something, I do recommend Data Rescue. Wow! It found stuff I didn't know I had. Only problem is that the epub and pdf files it found didn't retain their file names, only numbered, so I've had to go through and look at each of them to determine what to keep, and most to trash again.

an entire backup disc

In TM you can choose "exceptions" and only back up what you want.

I use an external 2 TB Harddrive where I only reserve 500GB for TM.

Time Machine does regular, automatic backups and they are incremental. That is, each time it backs up, it only adds the new or changed files. The nice thing about this is not only that it is automatic and you don't have to remember to do a backup, but it also allows you to browse through previous backups if you are looking for something in particular.

Once your external HD fills up, TM notifies you that it wants to delete one or more of the very oldest backups, which could be months or a year old. With my oldest iMac that has a 500MB HD and a 1TB external HD, that took more than a year to happen, and it was OK with me if TM wanted to delete a backup from a year ago, while keeping all the other backups since then.