I know I can look on Quora and other places to get opinions, but I figured I’d ask here anyways.
I normally rely on TimeMachine for my backups. It seems to work a treat, until it doesn’t. At some point, for reasons I don’t understand, at some point, TimeMachine decides that the backup drive is no longer intact and I am given no option other than to erase and start again. So there goes another 18 months of backup history.
I’ve tried both locally mounted drives (USB), and network drives. Right now, I have an old 2TB Time Capsule setup as the latest drive (it’s now 2 days old), but I don’t have a lot of faith in that.
What do people here use? Do you use online, offsite (e.g. BackBlaze)? Carbon Copy Clone, or something else? My main issue with BackBlaze is the monthly subscription, and concern that I’m trusting that they never get hacked…
Same experience with networked time machine drives. I now backup my Mac to a Synology raid using Arq backup software, and have a backblaze B2 subscription to backup the Synology online. Not cheap, but I did need to restore files at some point and while nerve wrecking it all worked out. Yay backups.
I feel your pain, too, with Time Machine! Just yesterday, my wife realized that her TM hadn’t backed up for a month… and what’s worse, her Mac didn’t recognize her external drive. She tried running Disk First Aid which didn’t work, and ended up having to erase and reformat the drive. Once that was done, her Mac offered to use the drive for Time Machine.
I think that if you really need to retain those 18 months of backups, you might want to buy a second drive to clone what’s on the first on a regular basis. Carbon Copy Cloner is what I have used for years.
We also use iCloud, but not sure that it offers the same kind of functionality as Time Machine; I don’t think that it does. But it’s better than nothing.
OK. Time to change. I’m a little tired of fighting this battle. If TM worked as advertised it would be such a good solution. For something so important, it’s something that really can’t afford to have the level of failure it has.
iCloud can replace the “I spilled water on the laptop” case, or “they stole my laptop” case (though Apple storage plans are pricey), but it won’t replace the history of a TM disk, if that’s what you want, for the “I made some dumb edits and want to go back to last week’s version” case. The TM UI is bizarre but is better than the alternatives by the way. If only TM were as reliable as it is functional.
I’ve got CCC running (as a trial) to see how it goes. Seems a very slow process. It’s certainly very nicely presented and quite intuitive. Like Sitely, it’s refreshing to find a macOS app that plays well.
I am thinking I could achieve the same thing CCC is doing with a straightforward rsync script run each day by cron. But I wouldn’t necessarily have what I need for a migration or restore and from something I read about CCC, they have thought of, and accommodated that need.
I once had a Qnap server and it died after 2 years and 1 month. Luckily I had a daily backup of the Qnap to Backblaze.
A lot depends on how much data you want to keep of course. Personally I don’t need more than 500gb.
My setup: I swear by a small SSD drive and Timemachine to restore my Mac and to fall back on a backup of a few days when necessary. In case of a total crash I will always start from a clean install including third party software (Adobe, Affinity, Sintely, …) and then only retrieve the data with Timemachine.
In addition iCloud for daily work. I have enough with 50gb.
For storage a 500gb cloud storage. Called Icedrive in combination with SyncTime (app for Mac for a few dollars) via webdav. Works fine.
But, invest what you feel good about.
rsync can do the job, except restoring is clearly going to be a bit more manual than a nice UI.
The main drawback though is macOS files aren’t always plain files, they have extended attributes and other metadata that isn’t always properly copied, stored on the server or restored, whereas dedicated macOS software does do that.
yes these extended attributes are indeed an issue. back in the old days, the resource fork was also a problem for non-Apple file systems.
I’ve had to pause my CCC experiment. It is so slow copying via ethernet it is ridiculous and I just don’t have 48+ hours where I can just leave it copying stuff at 1.2 … 6.5 mbps.
I think I’ll have to pull the SSD out of the file server and connect it via USB to get the speed needed. That will also allow CCC to keep those all-important extended attributes.
Thanks again Duncan. You have a great community here.
For what it’s worth, I use carbon copy cloner instead of Time Machine, and it has saved me from losing prior versions more times than I care to admit. For me, using an SSD, external hard drive, for my backups, it has been lightning, fast, much faster than Time Machine for me, but your mileage may vary.