Which backup should I restore?

My three-month-old MacBook Pro was stolen recently. My insurance is coughing up for a new one but I’m wondering which is the best way to restore my data. As an avid fan of MacFormat I have ‘done the right thing’ and kept two backups: Time Machine’s hourly backups and a complete disk backup every Sunday night using Carbon Copy Cloner. By ‘happy’ coincidence, my laptop was stolen on a Monday lunchtime, so both backups are equally up-todate. Which one should I use when the new MacBook arrives? Are there any advantages either way? Keith Chancery There are, but the differences are fairly minor. If you are restoring to exactly the same hardware, then Carbon Copy Cloner’s image will give you the least trouble. It will be faster and you’ll be able to carry on exactly where you left off. But if your new MacBook has a different spec in any way (for example, if you had Yosemite on the old Mac and El Capitan on the new one), then telling the Setup Assistant to restore from the Time Machine backup is likely to work better. It will intelligently migrate your apps and data across, taking into account any differences between the two Macs. If you restored from Carbon Copy Cloner, you’d overwrite El Capitan with Yosemite. You could still upgrade back to El Capitan afterwards of course. This should work fine, but it might be a slightly more tortuous route to take.