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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
@Snelly Thanks for your help in driving this conversation about backing up our Macs! And thanks, as always, to the many members of this forum for their contributions! This topic is endlessly fascinating to me.
I have an MBP 2021 and iMac 2020 and am currently pondering over something similar in respect of a NAS or a Mac mini for backups - am I right in understanding that it’s not going to be easy actually setting up a Mac mini without an external display?
We will have to agree to disagree on that. I managed all kinds of hardware, servers, NAS/SAN, etc. I’ve found that nothing is bulletproof, everything fails.
I’ve told this story before: I know of two companies that were unable to restore data after hardware failures. One didn’t have a copy of the drivers needed to operate their obsolete tape drive. The other had not been verifying their backups by actually restoring some data on a regular basis. Their logs didn’t show any problems, but they had not had a successful backup in many months. Both companies went out of business as a result.
If you plan for things to fail then you have a good chance of recovering when it happens. If you don’t . . .
I had hardware failures, software failures and fan failures on the two Drobo’s that I owned. Dealing with he issues and trying to maintain my data was a huge pain in the butt, took months to resolve and many hours of my time. I would never recommend a Drobo to anyone.
Funny enough, the Pegasus line is exactly why I want to avoid a RAID setup now. I had a cascading series of hard drive failures in a Pegasus RAID when I went on vacation once. The RAID was less than a year old, and all four drives went caput in the same week. At the same time, the backup of my RAID also failed (not related to Pegasus). When I came back from vacation, I’d lost years of archived raw photos from client shoots. To make things worse, a couple days later the RAID couldn’t even function over Thunderbolt anymore. Promise told me this was an “Apple problem” and they couldn’t help me.
Since then, I’ve tried to avoid RAID and gone for normal external drives, which have failed but never so disastrously.
I was once a big fan of Drobo. Between 2008 and 2011 I purchased multiple 4 & 5 drive models and a couple of 8 drive Drobos. But the company seem to change around that time and I started having some problems with their software. Nothing serious but enough to make me lose confidence in their products.
Welcome to the MPU forums, @kallumrich! I feel like there might be some way to get past this with a Luna Display dongle or something, but don’t quote me. But yes, you’re right in that it’s definitely not easy.
