Carbon Copy Cloner vs Time Machine: best backup software for Mac

[mwheelerk]

I have primarily used Time Machine on two external HDD as primary and secondary (weekly/monthly) backups.  I am experiencing some slowdown in the time it takes to backup.  I'm unsure if it is the HDD or Time Machine causing this unusual (it seems to me) long back up time (several hours vs a few minutes).  I have used Carbon Copy Cloner in the past but I would consider myself very novice in understanding the set up and advantage of using one or the other.

 

I want both my MacBook and my Music Library which is on an external SSD to be backed up at the same time.  Can you advise which software solution would be best and how to properly set it up?  Additionally the HDD I use now are external portable 4TB units.  I have a reason to use external portable versus desktop units for backup and storage.  I've thought about getting two more 2TB SSD like my SSD now used for my Music Library to use as the backups.  Do you feel a 2TB size is sufficient to back up a music library with a current size of 850GB.  It will grow but not by any dramatic rate increase over the next few years.

[mwheelerk]

I still haven't made a move to back up with CCC.  I did order the 2TB SSD to use with CCC.  I am having a bit of difficulty in understanding how to set it up so that two sources, my MacBook SSD and my Music Library SSD, can be backed up to the same destination at the same time.  With Time Machine this task was quite easy to include/exclude drives.

[mwheelerk]

I actually use three drives for backups.  One for Time Machine and two different ones for Carbon Copy Cloner.  The Time Machine drive backs up everything Mac and also an external drive that houses my music library.  The first CCC drive is used specifically for a bootable backup of the Mac system.  The second is a dedicated backup of the external Music Library drive.  Maybe a little overdone but I have peace of mind as much as possible and have both my computer and my music library with two back ups.