I’ve never used Super Duper, and I’ve never restored a full computer from CCC. I have restored other drives from CCC and it’s a breeze. It’s just a drag and drop operation (or command line move).
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Time Machine is far from perfect but when it works, it’s great, so I use it as my first line of defense. But I also run daily and weekly Carbon Copy Cloner backups to a set of (currently) six external drives that I manually plug in on a rotating basis. And, finally, I have started doing a weekly backup via Arq to their cloud storage. (I used to rotate a backup drive to a safe deposit box every two months, so even a weekly offsite cloud backup is an improvement.)
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Time Machine is a native app on Macs and an add on to everything else that offers TM support. I consider TM a 90% solution. So, IMO, if Apple cannot deliver a rock solid backup on their own hardware how can a third party?
I still back up locally to TM because it is the easiest way to recover quickly in the case of a total failure. But I also backup to a local drive and to the cloud using Arqbackup. And I do test restores from each system on a regular basis.
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cc: @Snelly - I used a directly connected external drive that had a Carbon Copy Cloner backup on it with Migration Assistant to set up my new M1 MacBook Air last June.
It was a joy to use after having started the setup using the Time Machine backup on my network connected Time Capsule, and giving up due to its lack of responsiveness.
So what I’ve gathered from @karlnyhus, @WayneG, and @mitchell3417 (and my thanks to all who have jumped in):
- Thanks to the native Mac file systems, if a Mac mini or older Mac is feasible, that would potentially make a better backup server than a NAS.
- I ought to use CCC or Chronosync, either instead of or in addition to Time Machine (whatever is more feasible based on budget and the hard drive setup over time). CCC in particular sounds like it facilitates easy backups to remote drives and easy restores from local drives.
I know there are, technically, thing I’m missing out on by not using a NAS: out-of-the-box RAID (although I’ve had some bad RAID experiences that make me less likely to trust it), easy web servers, etc. But if I mostly just care about making sure I have reliable backups for two laptops, it sounds like NAS would require more maintenance than I’m willing to give it. Do I have the right read on that?
I use an Intel Mac mini with a big OWC RAID array as my home server. I previously used a NAS (Drobo, in my case) and had found the mini with lots of attached external storage to fit my needs much better. There are certain things that don’t work well on a network share (Photos and iTunes libraries, for example). Having them directly attached to a Mac gives me confidence that I’ll have a full local copy of these. The fact that my big pot of storage is directly attached to a Mac also makes online backup much easier. Just install Backblaze and pay for one of their unlimited storage plans. IMO, a Mac mini with sufficient attached storage makes a much better home server solution than a NAS.
That said, I have never found Time Machine over the network to be reliable. This has been true whether the target was a Time Capsule, NAS, or a network share from another Mac. I’ve switched to Arq for my network backups. It’s been far more reliable and consistent for me so far.
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Chris, I hoped you’d chime in! I had a feeling you might have experience with this. Thanks for your feedback; this is all very helpful.
I’m still confused about what backup solution is best. Time Machine has failed me before, so it wouldn’t be the only one I use. I’m looking towards CCC, but curious what you use Arq for in this case. Is it just for quickly moving manually selected files from one machine to another, or do you make automated backups with Arq?
I would argue the other way - the uptime on my NAS is currently at 26 days, and Synology emails me to let me know when there are updates for the pacakges I’ve installed so it’s set and forget pretty much. I don’t have to keep logging in or connecting a screen to a Mac to check if it’s working (or worry to much about remote desktop connections) or to check and install updates.
Note your comments about accessing the hard drives externally from the NAS - this may rule out using RAID on the NAS.
Arq is a full backup solution and is my preferred backup method. I have it access my NAS and save data to it every hour - similar to Time Machine. However, it’s never failed me, but Time Machine has. I’ve a local hard drive setup as a time machine drive, but that’s overkill really.
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Fundamentally, Arq is a backup product that does incremental backups (only saves things when they are changed) and stores a versioned backup history (you can go back in time to retrieve files you’ve deleted or previous versions of files that you’ve changed). This is essentially the same fundamental feature set as Time Machine.
The difference is that Time Machine can only store files on a directly attached drive or a network share (and as discussed, the latter doesn’t really work well). Arq can store files in a huge variety of online storage services.
Because of this, it seems like most people using Arq are using it more as a replacement for an online service like Backblaze. However, Arq can also back up to locally attached drives or network shares, meaning it can be used as a replacement for Time Machine as well.
In my case, I use Arq as a replacement for Time Machine’s dodgy network backup capabilities. I run Arq on my Mac Studio and MacBook Pro, backing them up to my Mac mini (via SFTP, so I don’t have to worry about network drive mounting issues).
All three computers also get backed up to Backblaze. The Studio and the mini’s SSD get cloned every night using CCC and some of the files on the mini’s RAID array get backed up to a rotating pair of external hard drives every week.
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This is all a very good point, but as you also note, accessing backups locally prevents me from using RAID on a NAS, and for me I think probably rules it out (and that was part of the “maintenance” I was thinking of was the restore process, but I should have used better language).
@ChrisUpchurch, thank you so much for that level of detail! That basically sounds like exactly how I want my setup to work. Sounds easy enough that I can more or less set and forget it. I’ve bookmarked your post for reference.
I’m at the the point that I don’t trust TM enough to consider it viable for a complete restore. I’ve tried wireless back up to an always-on Mac, plugged in USB drives, NAS, and they all eventually stop working one way or another. And anything other than a USB device is super, super slow to back up.
So now I run TM (slowly) on my Synology. I also back up certain vital folders to my NAS, which are then backed up automatically via CCC to a USB drive that is connected to my always-on Mac. That entire Mac gets back up to BackBlaze.
This way, I have TM mostly for accessing recent changes and versions of files, but I don’t rely on it solely in an emergency. I also have access to anything I need directly through the NAS or even from BackBlaze. And I have the NAS backed up redundantly to the USB drive and BackBlaze.
Time Machine is so convenient in theory, it just doesn’t deliver for me on its promise. And I would not even attempt to restore from it in a disaster. I would do a fresh install and get my data from one of the other sources. Meanwhile, I do use to grab an overwritten file or previous version.
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I agree with you on TM issues. My last Time Machine restore did not go well, and I lost many working directories. Still have no idea why.
Can you elaborate on your mix of Synology and an always-on Mac?
Sure.
I have a USB drive plugged in a Mac in my home office that is always on. This Mac is running BackBlaze, which includes the USB drive. It also runs a few Carbon Copy Cloner tasks at 2am every night that sync some shared folders* from the NAS to the USB drive. That gives me a back up of my NAS on the drive, and a backup of that drive to BackBlaze. So I have those files in at least three places, not including on my “regular” MBP that I use everyday.
*All of these folders live in my main shared folder on the NAS that I mount automatically on my everyday Mac using AutoMounter, so it’s easy to access and transfer files to it wherever I am.
Hope that helps. It took me months to sort this out, but it’s been working well now for a couple months. Happy to fill in additional details if you need.
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I used a similar setup when I was using the Drobo.
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This is all very interesting. What benefits do you get out of this setup compared with, say, something like what @ChrisUpchurch does now with just the always-on Mac?
I’ve had desktop computers and consumer grade NAS devices run 24x7 for years. Once set up neither needed much more than monitoring and the occasionally update. But both required monitoring. When it comes to my data I never trust my devices.
Because it’s a full computer a Mac would offer more options if used as a backup device. But either a Mac or a NAS would be a good choice depending on your needs, IMO.
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I’m not sure, but maybe he can answer that.
I briefly looked into Arq and something else as a Time Machine replacement. Maybe it was Chronosync. I couldn’t wrap my head around it at the time. Maybe that was before I knew what I would be getting into to make my current setup work 
NAS is totally set/forget bulletproof - runs entirely in background unless something happens which needs user attention - in which case it alerts you.
From a software perspetive, the Mac Mini may well be quite adequate. But a NAS is about hardware backup, not software backup. The NAS is much more capable/sophisticated in terms of establishing a RAID array and recovering from any hardware (drive) failures that occur.
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I can say that my Drobo NAS definitely was not “set it and forget it”, though the issues seemed to be more with the Drobo Mac app than whatever ran on the hardware itself. Also one fan failure on that required a replacement.
The OWC’s multiple bay enclosures, and SoftRAID give a Mac mini most of the hardware capabilities of a NAS setup. About the only thing I miss from the NAS is the ability to use multiple drive sizes, and to upgrade the size of the array in-place. SoftRAID requires identically sized drives and you can only expand the array by wiping it and starting from scratch.
That said, I only went to the RAID array when my needs exceeded what I could do with an external USB hard disk. Having both a working disk and a backup that got cloned to every night connected to the mini was sufficient redundancy when combined with my other backup methods. Once my dataset exceeded the size of the external drive and I had to start splitting my data between two working drives and two backups it got to be enough of a pain that I went to the RAID array.
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This is all a good point, and I don’t disagree with you about reliability, but absolutely nothing is every bulletproof. Everything still requires some monitoring. And in the environment my NAS would end up in (in a dusty work room, plugged in to my main router by the furnace and the hot water tank), it would absolutely require more monitoring than a Mac mini plugged in on my desk. That room destroys everything except my tool chest. Even having a router in the room can be painful (although basically non-optional in this house).
It’s all contextual.
I appreciate your point though: it is easier to maintain the RAID in a NAS than it is to maintain the RAID in a Mac mini. Probably true! But it’s also probably true that it’d be easier to restore from backup with a Mac mini and the native HFS+/APFS drives.
So for me, based on this thread, I’m really leaning Mac mini here. But it’s not that your’e generally wrong, and I don’t think anybody is trying to say that a NAS is unreliable.
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