COMMERCIAL RESOURCE MANAGEMENT  My primary difficulty with Retrospect was that they compressed the data in a proprietary format and the overall process seemed a bit awkward overall to me.

I followed the blog linked by the prior reviewer and zeroed in on Carbon Copy Cloner as I am presently using this. That writer said "doesn't preserve . . . creation date, HFS+ extended attributes," "not recommended"

Then I checked the Bombich software site FAQ and they state under the question "CCC requires an HFS+ formatted target volume": "The HFS+ filesystem defines many types of metadata that describe non-data attributes of your files. Creation date, access control lists, permissions and ownership, Finder flags, and extended attributes are among the various metadata types defined in the HFS+ standard. To adequately back up all of your files and their associated metadata, CCC requires that your backup volume is also formatted as HFS+."

I back up daily to an OWC supplied Firewire 800 external drive, and weekly to the same drive offsite, plus using Time Capsule for protection of business data.

This morning I booted up my MacBook Pro from the external drive using last night's backup made with Carbon Copy Cloner, checked Mail, Opened Safari, opened a cluster of database and word processing files I had updated yesterday and everything worked just fine.

I only use one type of back up - incremental, deleting all differences, so I always have a duplicate startup drive.

I was interested to see if Super Duper would be quicker, but the software (incremental backup) is disabled until payment is received, whereas Carbon Copy Cloner is fully functional as I believe was the original intent of shareware "try before you buy."

Reviews I've read all seem to praise Super Duper, but unless I am missing something, I don't see the benefit to paying more for the same functionality.  
(Version 2.6.2)