One part of my system is that much of my key data is stored in a local directory that is also synced somewhere else. Increasingly, I’m using Synology Drive: a Dropbox-like system that uses your Synology rather than, or in addition to, the cloud, as the basis for syncing.
It works beautifully for me, and it means that I can use all the range of backup options that Synology offer to back up that shared directory to the cloud, or do BTRFS snapshots to another Synology, or whatever. And in addition, the machines running Synology Drive also run Time Machine, so the data gets backed up two different ways.
It’s not a whole-machine backup, but it covers a lot of the stuff I care about.
Having said all of that, I must have another look at Arq. I used it many many years ago, when S3 was the only real option and was a bit pricey. But with Backblaze B2 etc…
I’ve tried the NAS life, but after trying Synology and QNap both, I’m done. The QNap along with a QNap Switch gave me a 10GBe network to use (using a QNap 10GBe to Thunderbolt 3 adapter - the optical kind), I was never happy with backing up to Time Machine that way. We were both using M1 and Intel MacBook Pros, and, as of last week, my new Mac Studio Max. And let’s not even get into the lack of support with either NAS and APFS.
The reason for the unhappiness was the backups always ended up corrupted and having to be replaced. And now that we would need to transition to HPFS for Time Machine, I just threw that solution out the window. And I’m pretty much done with Time Machine.
Now I’m using Chronosync 10 for local backups and synchronization tasks to a 12TB Thunderbolt 3 G-Drive. I’m backing the Macs and my two OWC 4M2 NVME RAIDs to Backblaze, and the G-Drive is going to be backed up to Backblaze B2 using Chronosync.
I found as a photographer (retired) even 10GBe connections in-house were not up to snuff for my needs. I need Thunderbolt 3 to be happy working with my files. That and the constant corruption of Time Machine backups have made my desk a lot less cluttered. And I can sell off the Synology and QNap NASs, though I think I might keep the QNap switch for the two 10GBe ports and eight 2.5 GBe ports.
I will miss accessing my files from the NAS when I’m on the living room couch, but I suppose there’s a way to remote into my Mac Studio to retrieve them if I really want to do some work while watching Slow Horses and Strange New Worlds!
I am going down a similar path probably with CCC and hard drives plugged into the mac mini. I just wanted to ask if sleeping / waking the mac mini is possible (or a bad idea) as I will only be backing up for short periods of the day or at night. Has anyone looked into this?
It’s taken me forever to get around to it, but I’m nearly out of ports on my MacBook Pro and Studio Display, and my wife’s laptop hasn’t been backed up in over a year, so I bit the bullet and ordered a refurb M1 Mini today. It’s still cheaper than what I would have ended up spending in Synology land and it fits my needs better (Mac-centric with easy restore options should the worst happen).
The unit arrives on Monday and I’ll try to keep you all posted on how it goes once I get it set up. (Not really sure how to set it up headless or anything, so any and all advice is still appreciated!)
I’ve got this all set up the way it’s detailed earlier in the thread:
I have a Mac Mini with a couple external hard drives attached.
I am using Arq to backup my laptop to one of the external hard drives, as though it were a Synology-type NAS. The backup happens every hour, and it works a la Time Machine.
I am using Carbon Copy Cloner to duplicate my Lightroom hard drive to a remote copy of my Lightroom hard drive, so my Lightroom catalog backups and the photos themselves are on two drives.
The Mac Mini is always on and the two drives that are attached to it are backed up via Backblaze.
I’m a little eh on this whole setup though.
Arq is a little odd to use in that it doesn’t mirror your file directory. It creates its own packages of files and folders. So you can’t hop in to your backup and just grab the file you want.
CCC lets you mirror your exact file directory, which is what I want. But on their website, they pretty strongly and clearly say they don’t recommend automated hourly remote backups because they want to avoid potential corruption problems should you get disconnected from the network. I am using it for the photo hard drive because that drive only needs to be copied when I manually trigger it.
Does anybody use CCC for automatic remote backups? Have they encountered any issues? I would kind of prefer seeing my files and folders in typical directories, rather than Arq’s “blobs,” as they call them.
I use CCC for remote backups. It can be hard to get very large storage to back up properly. It takes a couple days for CCC to go through my network (Mac mini) DAS and back everything up. 15 TB. Often there are errors and it doesn’t complete. Although, I just freshened everything up and it’s working great.
To reduce backup times, I have archive folders outside the backup path that I don’t add anything to, so they only needed to be backed up once. Things like massive email backups from 10 years ago, photo libraries, old videos, etc. so I have redundant backups of the archives on my Synology, but CCC doesn’t need to crawl them so the backup tasks are much faster.