Thinking to start backing up my mac since I lost a few files lately due to buggy apps.
Goal: the backup should be reliable, so when I want them, they “work”, rather than have some sort of issue during restore process. Privacy is another aspect so don’t want to hand over data to BackBlaze like service.
Should I just do time machine?
IF YES, should it be HD or SSD? Also, I want to make it wireless since I always use my laptop around the house, how can that be done. Another tiny peace-of-mind thing I want is this HD/SSD not connected to the internet (I know some Synology drives do ask you to create an account and are connected to the internet - I don’t trust these companies enough to provide them with ALL my files )
ELSE,
Any other reliable softwares? Super duper, carbon copy cleaner, etc? Thoughts?
ELSE,
Just manually copy all folders to a HD every few days…
Time Machine is good for versioning, and for when you’ve lost a file or deleted it accidentally and want to retrieve it right now. I would use a dedicated portable SSD for it.
I personally wouldn’t do wireless for Time Machine, because then it saves it as a “sparse bundle” and I’ve heard people have problems with that method. Other people here who do use Time Machine with a networked device will probably have vastly different ideas about this.
Sometimes Time Machine isn’t perfect, so I’m trending my answer toward “more reliability” rather than “more flexibility”.
I use SuperDuper! and on a modern Apple Silicon Mac will copy the data partition, which is where all of your data lives anyway. If you want to copy the system partition then you have to do it on a blank drive. Copying the system partition is getting harder and harder so I wouldn’t rely on it booting. I would use a spinning hard drive for SuperDuper!
The more the file is precious, the more places you want to put it. I also have drive.filen.io as cold storage, meaning it’s not a program on the computer, but I get to it on their website.
I have TimeMachine, Backblaze and then on two external drives a clone of my drive and backup of home with versioning and keeping deleted files using Carbon Copy Cloner. The new version of CCC is very quick.
There are several good backup programs available but I’ve been using Arqbackup for the past 12 years and Backblaze B2 for around 6 years. I trust no one (TNO) so my backups are encrypted before they are transmitted to B2. I’ve done thousands of backups and, including tests, hundreds of restores
Arq can be used with local storage as well as cloud providers like AWS, Dropbox, Google, and OneDrive.
Recommend you design a backup regime that follows the 3-2-1 process. Lots of articles on we be to describe it as it relates to duplicates and on and offsite copies.
I use wireless Time Machine and find it it to be just as unreliable as the wired Time Machine method I used to rely on, which was also not terribly reliable.
I’d recommend using Time Machine because it’s easy and free, and Backblaze with their one year of archive so you have something offsite (and reliable) in case of catastrophe. I think Backblaze is much more reliable than Time Machine ever was.
3 - 2 - 1 Ideally, you should have 3 different backups on 2 different media with 1 offsite.
Time Machine is a good first stage, just be aware that you’ll probably have to start again from time to time. I’d use a large spinning hard drive for this.
Carbon Copy Cloner or Super Duper can take a point in time backup of a drive and then incrementally update that without copying all again. Put this On an SSD
Then something like Backblaze to have an offsite copy
Manual backups don’t work, sooner or later you’ll forget
Wireless backups to NAS or another computer are sloooooooooooooow and a bit more flaky that directly attached HDDs (especially if it’s Time Machine)
Test restores from your backups should be completed regularly to ensure that they’re working.
I bought a whole Synology and set aside 8TB for Time Machine backups, and another 10TB for archive backups. Then I bought a Mac Mini, plugged in a huge hard drive to it, set up a Carbon Copy Cloner job that copies the archived files from the Synology to the Mac Mini’s hard drive, and then sends it all to Backblaze.
I’ve basically Siracusa’d my life, and I just don’t think about backups anymore. Expensive, but worth it in my professional context.
I’m a big proponent of the 3-2-1 backup strategy, but I’m a much bigger proponent of a backup strategy that is simple and automatic: Nearly nobody (MPUers excepted) will do things in the long term that have manual or complicated steps.
I’m an even bigger and more enthusiastic proponent of any backup method that gets regularly tested with restores. Most backups are tested only when they’re needed, and that’s exactly the wrong time to find out they aren’t working
I had problems 4 or 5 years ago, because Time Machine wouldn’t allow you to access a backup for a drive that wasn’t mounted, which was difficult because it was dead…
Hence 3-2-1 because any drive can die at any time.
While I maintain one Time Machine backup I use CCC with Safetynet as my primary backup as I’ve found it easier to recover from. The backups are easily read from another Mac.
While it’s not a real backup I sync my files via iCloud so they are stored on both my iMac and Air. If a machine should die or whatever, I have immediate access to all my files. I don’t optimize storage so the files are kept on the respective machines.
As mentioned any backup strategy should be as automatic as possible. Also regular testing of your backups is important. When I was working, we performed quarterly disaster recovery testing. In some cases systems had to be restored without the availability of certain people.
You’re going to get a hundred different answers to this question and they will all (probably) be correct, and I can’t imagine it’s going to help you figure out much at all because I was in the same boat as you a few years ago and it was really hard figuring out what met my personal level of comfort, suited the data I wished to preserve, wasn’t complex to maintain, didn’t cost more than I was willing to pay, and was reliable.
However, for what it’s worth, I do think you should maintain 2 systems regardless of what they are, so that if one unexpectedly doesn’t work, you have a second to fall back on.
I use Time Machine as my second, “let’s do a full sweep of the Mac” backup. I use it with an app called Time Machine Editor which lets me do Time Machine updates only when I want to, and I use an external drive. This is for two main reasons:
It bugs me having an external drive permanently connected to my MacBook Pro, particularly because it kept cycling and the noise annoyed me.
Some apps aren’t so happy with a Time Machine snapshot while they’re running and it could add complexity if you needed to restore (as in, if you tried to restore from a snapshot that was taken while the app was in use, it might be an issue for a couple of apps). Running it at a time that suits me means I can anticipate this problem and close what needs closing.
My main backup however is just a manual one I do to copy all my files to a (second) external drive. It takes maybe 20 mins, I date the folders and it’s a big drive so I’ve not had to delete anything from it yet. I know that I have literal copies of my files and it reassures me more than Time Machine does. If something happened, I could just plug this drive into any Mac and open the file I need.
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