This is one situation where it does make sense to have both a belt and suspenders …
I’ve been using Time Machine pretty much since it came out. I guess I’m lucky as I’ve never had an issue. This past summer (northern hemisphere) our house took not one but two direct lightning strikes, about a week apart. Which fried, among other things, my Mac mini. I got a replacement, and used the last Time Machine backup to restore everything.
I also use BackBlaze and had them send me a hard drive of my system backup just in case. I did not need it. But had the Time Machine drive also been fried it would have been a lifesaver. Like I said, belt and suspenders.
Photography is one of my hobbies, and I use Chronosync to keep a local backup of my images (which are also backed up with Backblaze). One of my image drives was working but having issues (sometimes it would mount, sometimes it would mount but show no files, some times it wouldn’t mount). Fortunately I had local and offsite backups, and after buying a new drive, replaced the dying one (also because of the lighting strikes).
And for historical reasons I also have SuperDuper, which I use for making bootable drives.
So that’s my three copies:
The live files on the working drives.
Time Machine, Chronosync, and SuperDuper (I really could consolidate here, but it is working so …) as my local backups.
Backblaze for off site.
And I use a mix of HDDs and SSDs based on the amount of data to backup. So the local system drive backup is to a SSD while the image files are to HDDs. Mainly because of cost.
So to answer your question, the best way forward is to determine your backup strategy and then pick the software and hardware to achieve that. The products and services mentioned in this thread are all good ones, and as you note you already own/use some.
From what I understand, Time Machine makes snapshots on my data drive and you can’t turn that off. Does Arc7 just back up to your desired drive w/o making snapshot on your local drive. I don’t want snapshots on my local drive.
Should I be concerned with the number of times snapshots are written to the internal SSD, whether using TM or Arq 7 (re: educing the lifespan of my SSD)?
No, nothing to worry about.
My understanding is that the number of writes to the disk is not significantly increased, the snapshot is just hanging onto the pieces of files that would have been overwritten. So the writes that would have happened anyway are just happening to different places on the disk.
I was just trying to cover all possibilities of failure. For example if some flaw was discovered in CCC, I would have Arq backups, and vice-versa. CCC also used to make bootable backups, but later versions of macOS don’t allow that.
At one time, I had gone a little overboard with backups. In my defense though, it was a good thought experiment, trying to think of all vulnerabilities.
I turn the hourly snapshots off in Timemachineeditor. Backups to Time Capsule every four hours and daily and weekly backups to external drives via Carbon Copy Cloner are enough for me.
That’s quite a statement. If anything at all a backup programme should be reliable, that’s the whole point. It’s as concerning as someone handing me a parachute and telling me it might work.
Is this a consensus opinion? I’m only using Time Machine for all my backups.
I definitely wouldn’t do that, not with any backup program.
And I assume you have a cloud backup, like Backblaze, or something offsite at a bank, etc.?
All I can say is it’s my opinion. TM is great when it works but I’ve had problems on and off for years. The one that happened most often was it would stop working when the drive became full. It would not delete old backups.
When this happened there was nothing to do except erase the drive and start again. Frequently the user would not notice the problem for weeks so the Mac went unprotected until they did. More recently, with TM on APFS drives, I have seen TM run repeatedly without actually recording any data. And I have seen it appear to run correctly for weeks but not be readable when I try to restore files.
Today I use Arqbackup to do hourly backups to B2 and a nightly backup to OneDrive. And I use Chronosync to do a local backup. And I don’t trust any of them.
So I verify my backups by restoring a couple files from each backup around once a month. That is my advice to everyone. Don’t trust your backup system. Test it regularly.
Once upon a time I worked for a software development company*, one no longer in business, where a programmer there had written a backup program. For all the company’s data. Had he bragged about how fast it ran.
It ran fast because it didn’t actually back up anything. He never actually tested it. And then there was a major hard drive failure. The excrement hit the cooling device that day my friends.
So yeah, test your backups. Regularly.
*Now this was a company where the VP of programming, at the annual user conference, pushed back against the users complaining about bugs, chastising them because they weren’t testing the updates sent to them. Testing was not a priority at this company.
Must have happened more than once. This was a PC based company.
Now, the three founders, including that VP, came from a company that used System36 and AS400 systems. And were accused of stealing intellectual property. They were acquitted, albeit wrongly in my opinion. But I knew none of this as it was happening. But it turns out I was involved.
During this, I was working for the company with the IBM systems, and was given the task of finding our code that functionally matched some PC code, from where I did not know at the time (I was the guy that coded in C on AS400). It wasn’t until I was long gone from both companies, and reminiscing about the good old days that this story came out.
