After hearing good things, I tried out Superduper: It has 4 main modes of operation, but none of the 4 actually sounds like "safely copy my whole drive":

The 4 modes are:
- Backup user files: obviously not, I want to backup not only user files
- Backup all files: sound good, but...
- Safety clone shared users and apps: Hey, the last entry is not so good after all, I need backup AND safety! But I want to not only copy users + apps, I want to copy everything.
- Safety clone - shared users: Even less than the previous point.

So - no option that copies everything, right? :-( I'll stick with CCC, thank you.

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Sounds like you didn't RTFM. You seem to want the backup all files option.

The safety clone thing is obviously causing a little confusion. I'll quote the bit about safety clones from the manual, given that you didn't read it.

A Safety Clone is a bootable copy of your system, stored on another hard drive or partition, that shares your personal documents and data with the original. In the past, you might have stored this copy away in a drawer as a backup. With SuperDuper, you actually use the Safety Clone as your startup volume.

You can safely install any system updates, drivers or programs on the Safety Clone, without worrying about what might happen to your system. If anything goes wrong, you can simply start up from the original system. SuperDuper has preserved it in its original, pre-disaster state – but all your new and changed personal documents are totally up to date. Within minutes, you're up and running again – without having to go through a difficult and time-consuming restore process.

Of course, the original volume, being a "checkpoint", doesn't have any of the programs or system updates that you might have installed since you made the copy. That's a good thing, since they're probably what caused the problem in the first place!

Safety Clones are different than (and don't substitute for) a rigorous regular backup program. While backup programs excel at recovering specific files, and are great for archiving incremental changes to a set of documents, they're less useful when you don't know what's wrong, and therefore don't know what to restore! Restoring the entire system can take a long time, and it's difficult to restore a running system without going through the "disaster recovery" process... and that can take hours. With the Safety Clone, you only need to reboot!

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