Do You Use It? Backup Strategies Span the Gamut
In our most recent Do You Use It? poll, we asked which backup methods you could use to recover your data and get back to work. Versioned backups—made with Time Machine by most people—were by far the most common, receiving 87% of the votes, but cloud storage was also extremely popular, with 59%. Just over half of respondents (51%) rely on Internet backups, with fewer (41%) relying on regularly scheduled duplicates and 33% saying they could turn to a second Mac to get back to work. Only 9% of people said they manually copy files to external drives for backup, and I’m extremely pleased to see that no one said they ignore backups entirely. Of course, that mainly speaks to the self-selected nature of the poll respondents—TidBITS readers know that working without a backup is like tightrope walking without a net.
What most surprised me about the extensive discussions that followed the poll was how varied everyone’s strategies were. I suspect that this is one of those areas where putting thought into developing a backup strategy is most of what’s necessary for good results—the precise details can vary without significant loss of protection.
That said, I want to review each of the poll’s backup methods and discuss what I learned from people’s responses.
Versioned Backups
Versioned backups are essential for recovery because they maintain the contents of your drive at multiple points in time. They let you restore files when problems occur, whether from corruption, accidental overwrites, or deletions.
Ideally, deletions shouldn’t require going to your backups. To make recovering deleted files and folders even easier, use Finder > Settings > Advanced to turn on “Remove items from the Trash after 30 days” and don’t empty the Trash manually unless you really need the space. That way, you always have a month to pull a deleted item out of the Trash.)
The canonical versioned backup app is Apple’s Time Machine, which makes a backup every hour, automatically pruning the hourly backups after 24 hours and the daily backups after a week—it keeps weekly backups for all previous months. The oldest backups are deleted when space is needed, but Time Machine always keeps the latest version.
Some people don’t trust Time Machine because of bad experiences in the past, but it’s worth keeping in mind that Apple has radically changed how Time Machine works under the hood over the years, so what was true a decade ago no longer is today. What hasn’t changed is Time Machine’s tremendously funky interface for finding and restoring files. Happily, thanks to Time Machine’s use of snapshots, you can now navigate through your backups in the Finder. Choose the backup you want, and you’ll find all the data on your drive from that date.
Other apps also provide versioned backups. Apps that can make local versioned backups include Carbon Copy Cloner (which has evolved beyond the duplicates implied by its name) and Retrospect. The cloud backup apps Arq and Backblaze also provide versioned backups. In October 2023, Backblaze increased its free version history from 30 days to 1 year, but you must choose it explicitly—I just remembered to update mine (see “Backblaze Raises Prices, Makes Extended Version History Standard,” 25 August 2023).
Internet or Offsite Backups
I was excessively concise in the wording of this poll answer, labeling it just “Internet backups,” but where I was going with that is the need for a backup somewhere other than in the immediate vicinity of your Mac. Some sort of offsite backup is essential to protect from theft, fires, tornadoes, and numerous other disasters that will affect both your Mac and any backup stored with it.
Historically, offsite backups required schlepping hard drives to another location, a process that is only as reliable as the person doing the transport. Another issue with physical offsite backups is that the destination location often isn’t all that far away—storing a drive at your neighbor’s house won’t have helped if you live in Pacific Palisades. Plus, hard drive reliability isn’t improved by moving them around repeatedly.
That’s why I’ve become a big fan of Internet backup services like Backblaze. Before Backblaze, I relied on CrashPlan, which unfortunately discontinued its consumer-level services in 2018—see “CrashPlan for Home Ends Today,” 22 October 2018. There are others, like IDrive and Carbonite, but I haven’t used them.
Some people don’t like having another subscription fee, lack sufficient Internet bandwidth to back up a lot of data effectively, or are uncomfortable with storing their data in the cloud. If that’s true for you, you’re likely back to moving drives around.
Storing backups in a safe might seem like a reasonable alternative and would likely protect against theft as long as the safe is secure. However, not all “fireproof” safes are appropriate—ratings matter. You want at least a Class 150 or Class 125 safe, which is rated to keep the internal temperature below 150º (sufficient for magnetic media) or 125º (safe for optical media). Safes are also rated for how long they can keep the temperature below that level—although house fires can last several hours, it’s uncommon for the area around a safe to burn hot for more than 20 minutes before the fire moves on. Although wildfires burn much hotter and last longer, the safes are tested at higher temperatures than standard house fires. Don’t forget to look for water resistance—firefighters will be dousing the area with a lot of water.
Regularly Scheduled Duplicates
Although versioned backups generally provide a relatively quick way of accessing just the latest version of backed-up files, a duplicate is a more intuitive form of backup—it’s an exact copy of the selected files at the time of the backup. Duplicates don’t protect against file corruption or deletion because as soon as you update the duplicate, those changes are reflected in the backup copy.
However, duplicates are useful for restoring files quickly with familiar Finder actions rather than having to muck around in the weird Time Machine interface or use another app. They also work well with Migration Assistant for restoring data after erasing a drive or setting up a new Mac. (Migration Assistant also supports Time Machine, but not proprietary backup formats.) In addition, it is possible to make bootable duplicates that can, in some situations, be used to boot a Mac so you can get back to work as quickly as possible after some types of internal drive failure.
This answer in the poll was also poorly titled “Nightly duplicate.” I hadn’t anticipated that some people would make weekly or monthly duplicates, particularly bootable ones. They’re not perturbed that their duplicates are almost always outdated because they could get more recent files back from regular Time Machine backups or cloud storage. That’s true, but it seems to introduce unnecessary complexity over a nightly schedule.
A few people make duplicates manually, which is a fine addition to an automated backup strategy but not something to rely on solely. One of the cardinal rules of backup is that it’s best to remove the human element to the extent possible. If you have to remember to initiate a backup manually, Murphy’s Law states that you will forget or be too busy right before the event that causes you to need your backup.
In terms of software, the main players are Carbon Copy Cloner, ChronoSync, and SuperDuper. All three are fine apps and will do a good job of making duplicates. Carbon Copy Cloner has additional versioned backup capabilities, ChronoSync offers more synchronization options, and SuperDuper is the easiest and most focused on duplicates.
Cloud Storage
I need to emphasize that putting your files in cloud storage is not a backup. Here’s why: A backup, by definition, must be separate and independent from your working files. If you accidentally delete or corrupt a file in your cloud storage folder, that change immediately syncs to all your devices—there’s no way to recover the original. So when I use iCloud’s Desktop & Documents folder syncing feature to make files available on my iMac and MacBook Air, I may have a copy of each file on each Mac, but any changes I make to one of those copies are immediately reflected on the other machine. Versioned backups are designed to eliminate this concern, and even duplicates only reflect such changes when they’re updated.
However, cloud storage can play a huge role in getting back to work quickly after a disaster because all those files live in the cloud as well as on any synced devices. If you store much of what you do in folders synced by Dropbox, Google Drive, or iCloud Drive, as soon as you reconnect to your account from a reinvigorated Mac or new Mac, all your files immediately become accessible. You can even get to them from an iPhone or iPad. That also applies to Web apps like Google Docs, where data is never stored locally.
For some people, in some situations, cloud storage and Web apps let Macs act like the “thin clients” of yesteryear, providing an excellent local interface to apps and data hosted elsewhere on the network. I’ve heard of people who seldom back up their secondary Macs—usually a laptop—because everything they need is online. If something happened to the Mac’s drive, they would just reinstall macOS and log in to their cloud storage accounts.
Also, some cloud storage systems offer limited version history, enabling you to access previous versions of a file. Again, this is not the same as a versioned backup system, but it can help you get back to work more quickly.
Finally, although cloud storage systems are highly reliable thanks to data redundancy, geographic distribution, enterprise-grade hardware, constant monitoring, and professional maintenance, there’s always a chance that they could suffer a failure. Account-level problems pose a bigger risk—whether from security breaches, provider actions, or lost login credentials. As a result, it’s essential that you back up all cloud storage files separately. That’s somewhat easier said than done since you must ensure your files have been copied locally before they can be backed up. Files that are represented locally by just a stub icon won’t appear in your backup.
Second Mac
The next option in the poll involves having a second Mac available to get back to work more quickly. It’s important to remember that we don’t make backups for the sake of having backups; we make them so we can recover from setbacks. Many problems are minor, like an accidentally deleted file, and even more serious corruption can be addressed by erasing the drive, reinstalling macOS, and restoring files.
But what if your Mac is stolen, destroyed, or damaged badly enough that you must send it to Apple for repair? A backup of your data is necessary here, but it’s not sufficient on its own—you need another Mac. For anyone whose livelihood would be impacted by doing no work for a few days, having a second Mac available is critical. It probably doesn’t have to be as powerful as your main Mac, so using a laptop that supplements a desktop or keeping an older Mac around are good options. You can also use someone else’s Mac, possibly by using a bootable duplicate to have it act like yours, or by creating another user account and accessing your data from your backup or cloud storage accounts.
Another temporary workaround for those close to an Apple Store involves buying a new Mac with the understanding that you’ll return it within 14 days. Apple Store employees often recommend this approach when you bring a Mac in for repair.
Manual Backups in the Finder
As with manually created duplicates, backing up files by dragging them to an external SSD, hard drive, or USB flash drive is a fine way to give yourself a little more peace of mind. It never hurts to have an extra copy of your dissertation, novel, or other important document on another drive. (Well, except for the security risks if the drive isn’t adequately secured and managed.)
However, such manual backups must be in addition to an automated backup strategy. Again, you don’t want to put yourself in a situation where you could fail to make a backup when it is most necessary. Automation can ensure these critical tasks aren’t missed due to forgetfulness or busyness.
Evaluating Your Backup Strategy
Ultimately, as I noted above, backups are about getting back to work after something goes wrong. As you think about your current backup strategy, it’s worth asking yourself some questions:
- How quickly do you need to get back to work after a disaster? The more important this is, the more focus you will want to put on being able to use a second Mac with access to the same data. A bootable duplicate may also be helpful, but it’s essential to perform some dry runs to ensure everything works from the duplicate as needed.
- Could you recover from your house burning down or all your gear being stolen or destroyed? The chances of such an existential disaster are low, but unless you use an Internet backup service or maintain offsite backups, you could lose everything.
- To what extent is your backup strategy automated? If any aspect of it requires manual activation (connecting a drive, triggering a backup, moving a drive offsite), what’s the risk of failing to perform that task?
- How much are you willing to spend on backups? You’ll need a backup drive at minimum, and an Internet backup service subscription would also be beneficial. Hard drives are cheaper than SSDs but slower, louder, and less reliable.
- Is your backup strategy itself resilient? Drives fail, software has bugs, and people make mistakes. An advantage of a multi-faceted backup strategy is that the diversity of hardware and software makes you less vulnerable to any single point of failure.
- Have you tested your backups to make sure you can restore data from them? At a minimum, try restoring a few important files from each type of backup you maintain. For bootable duplicates, ensure they can actually boot your Mac, perform adequately, and provide access to critical apps. (Note that a bootable duplicate on a hard drive is too slow to be usable for real work—an SSD is required.)
The answers to these questions should help you build or refine a backup strategy to ensure that it provides the level of protection you need. Be realistic—I hear a lot of “Oh, I’m retired, so I don’t need to back up seriously anymore,” which is just as self-defeating as, “Oh, I’m not interesting, so hackers wouldn’t pay attention to me.” Bad things happen, and most people would be devastated at losing all their photos or overwhelmed by having to recreate their financial records. I just helped an elderly friend who was distraught about her Quicken data disappearing; happily, she had merely confused Quicken by renaming her data file, so we didn’t have to resort to her backup.
A thoughtful backup strategy delivers peace of mind while requiring relatively little in terms of cost or ongoing maintenance.
Thank you for letting us know that Backblaze now provides 1 year version history at no extra charge. I’ve been a Backblaze subscriber for 11 years and did not know that. It still took me a while to search the system in order to switch to this option, they don’t make it obvious.
Apparently folks need to be reminded: there is no reason you’re forced to use the TM interface if you do not like it.
Instead, you can in Finder navigate to your TM hard drive or SSD and just choose which backup from the long list of folders there which use the backup time stamp as their name. Navigate within those as if this were your actual Data partition. Thanks to Apple’s TM snapshot magic, everything there will appear as it was during that backup. Everything. Not just whatever got updated during that instance.
There are things that are more convenient through the TM interface, but if you detest it, there is nothing forcing you to stick to it rather than just browse your TM backup as just any other disk that happens to hold your backups.
So everybody gets to be happy — those that like the TM interface and those that hate it.
An additional strategy for the prudent (paranoid) person is to purchase an SSD—they’re so cheap, fast, and huge, now—clone your data to it, and take it with you when you’re traveling without your system. Additional peace of mind…
Dave
I’d suggest using an SSD regardless of travel. They’re quiet and far more reliable than HDDs. And since TM is throttled anyway, there’s no reason to pay top $ for a high-performance SSD just for backup. There’s plenty of quality but inexpensive SSDs to choose from that will do the job just fine. If you can, let HDDs die. Save money elsewhere.
A good point that I still forget too—adding it to the article. Thanks!
This is good to know, though I can hardly be “reminded” of something I don’t remember hearing in over thirty years of Mac use. Maybe I missed it, but if it didn’t occur to Adam either, I can’t bring myself to feel bad about not knowing.
It’s not quite that simple. My TM hard drive contains four sparsebundles, which it’s never occurred to me are openable and browsable. I have to double-click the applicable sparsebundle to see the Finder interface you describe.
I think we’re always going to disagree about this (this is far from the first thread where it’s come up).
At the small sizes consumers are likely to buy, yes, the differences in price are close enough that you might as well go with the faster SSD. But if you want/need high capacity, SSD prices can become prohibitive, and for very high capacities, SSDs don’t exist at all.
Using today’s pricing from MicroCenter for internal drives (since pre-manufactured externals don’t have the widest range of capacities and prices), I see:
If we compare the highest and lowest prices without regard to brands and specs, we see the differences between HDD and SSD to be:
In other words, at the 1TB and 2TB sizes, it’s pretty much a no-brainer. But for a 4TB drive, you probably want to think it over. For 8TB, you probably only want an SSD if you really need the performance. And if you need more than 8TB, you don’t have a choice unless you go for extremely high-end SSDs that you can’t afford without a corporate IT budget.
Of course, for a real-world purchase (vs. an academic exercise) you’d need to look more closely at devices’ brands, reliability history and performance specs as well.
You must be storing your backups on a network volume. A local USB-connected TM drive shouldn’t do this.
A local TM volume using HFS+ (if it was created before TM-over-APFS was available) will show each backup as a folder with a date-encoded name.
A local TM volume using APFS will show each backup as a snapshot with a date-encoded name that is presented by the Finder as a folder.
But why would you need such large drives? That gets back to backing up an entire drive, which isn’t really necessary for most people.
Bootable backups aren’t really a thing any more (and regular people wouldn’t know about them), and with probably 80% of an internal drive info that can be restored from the cloud or elsewhere (OS, applications, etc.) there isn’t actually that much data to back up.
If you really want versioned backups going back a decade a larger drive is needed, but for most people that’s overkill.
I’d suggest most people would be better off with two smaller SSD that can quickly backup critical files and they can do regularly and once a month (or quarterly) swap one of the drives with an offsite one (store the other at a friend’s or in a safety deposit box). Combined with a cloud backup (Dropbox, Backblaze, etc.) the person is reasonably protected.
This wouldn’t be ideal for a business, but is good enough for most people (and vastly better than no backup at all, which is what I’d guess 90% of people do now).
Yes, I use NAS, so I can back up my two MacBooks and my spouse’s without external drives hanging off them like colostomy bags.
If you work in video, film, or audio, or you run servers you need them. SSD’s are great for average backup needs but for those specialties spinning iron is the most cost-effective. A pro video editor may change hundreds of gigabytes a day and for big film houses it’s probably terabytes a day.
Yes, absolutely.
To be clear, though, I meant an SSD for travel in addition to your regular backup system. This is aimed in particular at people writing dissertations, programmers on the cusp of a release, and other extremely nervous persons.
Dave
The Voice of Experience says that if you pick and choose what to backup, the file you need won’t have been deemed “critical”. Better to just backup everything.
For example, I use an application that periodically gets its data messed up. The way to fix it is to restore a particular .plist from a backup, that is before it got corrupted – which you may not notice right away. Would a casual user know that they should be backing up the sandboxed files for this particular application?
If you’re one of those people who has ripped his entire movie collection from optical media to digital files, then you could easily need multiple-TB of storage, plus an equal amount for its backup.
If you do a lot of work with virtual machines, VM virtual disks are huge files (dozens or hundreds of GB) and change whenever the VM is running. If you want to back them up, retaining some kind of history, that may also require a lot of storage. Especially if you have many large VMs. (I suppose that if your backup software can intelligently copy only those blocks that have changed, then the APFS snapshot mechanism may allow all these VM backups to share a lot of their storage but I don’t know of any backup software that does this.)
As @Dafuki wrote, people who work in audio/video content creation generate/modify massive amounts of data. Probably not your Mac’s internal SSD, but on external/network volumes, which also have to be backed up.
As a regular viewer of Linus Tech Tips, I’ve seen plenty of videos about server storage requirements for content creators. Servers with dozens of large HDDs, including large numbers of SSDs as caches to those HDDs are not unusual in that market space. But I recognize that these are enterprise use-cases, not something individual users are likely to need.
On the other hand, although an individual user probably doesn’t require a server with dozens of 24TB drives, someone with a media collection might easily require three 8TB (or larger) drives - one for primary storage and two for backups.
One hour of CD-quality music (44.1 kHz, 16-bit stereo samples) with lossless compression (probably 2:1), is going to be storing about 300MB per hour. My music collection (what I’d consider mid-size) is about 1200 hours long (according to the status bar in the Music app). It currently consumes about 80 GB (MP3 and AAC compression), but if I were to have ripped all those CDs into a lossless format, that collection would occupy over 350 GB all by itself.
Video collections are much bigger. A DVD quality (SD) movie consumes about 4.7 GB. An HD movie is 8-15 GB. My video collection (a mix of VHS, DVD, Blu-Ray and UHD) is about 1300 titles (some are single movies, some are multi-disc box sets). A back-of-the envelope estimate of storage, should I try to rip them all would be about 5 TB if they’re all in SD format or 10-19 TB if they’re all in HD format.
And for both the music and the videos, you will definitely want backups - nobody will want to rip everything a second time.
In other words, not necessary for typical users, but definitely not unreasonable for some non-professional people.
See also: How Many GB is a Movie: Understanding the File Size of Your Favorite Films - BlinksAndButtons
A note on using SSD for backup versus a spinning HDD: recovery. You really have no option to recover data from an SSD where as with a HDD (platter/spinning mechanism) you can send the drive to the manufacturer’s recovery service with better chance of recovering data.
I took Scott’s training for data recovery. And he made it pretty clear that the SSD, while much faster and durable, has the issue of recovery. YMMV.
However, its not a bad idea to use an SSD if you replace it annually…they are cheap for 1TB sizes. But the feedback and suggestions by all are pretty sound. Local, offsite (Carbonite, Backblaze, Crashplan,…) and remote (mac or NAS) along with some firesafe for physical storage.
I feel for those in Los Angeles (or any disaster like flood, tornado, hurricane…) because you gotta evac, you grab and go.
If you have to leave on really short notice, yes.
But if you have a day or two notice (as is usually, but not always the case), you can think about what you need and pack the car. Be sure to take your backups and maybe also the computers if you can (an iMac or mini-tower system is probably too big, but you can throw a mini or a Studio into a suitcase with your clothes.)
An advantage of Internet backups is for users with laptops that are roaming a lot, where it is inconvenient to need to plug the computer into a backup drive. My experience is that users who backup their laptops by plugging in, don’t. That is, they mean to, but don’t get around to it.
In the past this need may have been solved by Apple’s Time Capsule, as long as you’re roaming within its network. Time Capsule is no more. While you can create your own networked Time Machine, it has disadvantages: it requires another computer to host it, it only works if you’re on the same network as the host, and I"ve heard that it doesn’t work as well as a locally attached Time Machine.
One of the cool things in CrashPlan Home was that you could be a host for a friend’s Internet backup. This was useful for getting family member’s machines backed up, when they didn’t want to buy a backup drive or subscription. It was free for them, and all it cost you was drive space.
Is there an open source solution to meet this need? Something simple to use?
Simple fix. Every notebook needs to be plugged into power at some point. Just make sure you connect a silent SSD to a powered hub (with 20-V PD support) and then instead of connecting that portable Mac to power, you just connect it to that hub. Done.
A good TM/SD/CCC backup doesn’t need to inconvenience anybody. Because I agree with you, TM to a local disk is just more robust than trying to use it in some kind of NAS setting over wifi.
Just do it now — you’ll end up thanking yourself later.
Thank you for a great summary. I use Time Machine but have found it messes up the Time Machine drive after awhile requiring replacement of the drive and loss of data. I use a 6 TB HDD now after losing several SSDs - expensive in the long run. I also regularly use CCC with rotated SSDs and HDD. Also use Backblaze and am very pleased with it - and appreciated the TB discount lol. I use Dropbox and iCloud for important files though I have found iCloud frustrating of late.
Appreciate all the great ideas and comments!
Wanted to let everyone know that on Thursday, David Nanian of Shirt Pocket Software sent me this:
“The replicator works in 15.3.”.
My assumption is that he tested SD with the latest beta version, V15.3.2, of Sequoia that was released on Thursday.
So, all is well with bootable clones, at least with SuperDuper!. Sure glad we have some developers around like David who refuse to give up.
Hmmm, I selected Regularly Scheduled Backups because I use CCC; perhaps I could have selected BOTH it and Versioned Backups?
Adam,
I can imagine a large group of users / readers do not understand that you have to back up your cloud data. That would be Google, Microsoft, and Apple.
Today many cannot ensure that all of the data is synced to a local device so that can be backed up. Also systems like Google Workplace and Microsoft 365 do not provide backups of that data…
I think the strategy needs to be more top-down and less “device-centric”
One topic that I’m interested in is in which backup strategies are resilient to having a bad actor hack your system and encrypt all of your data. I don’t know enough technical details to know which (if any) of the suggested backup techniques would be resistant to this.
Wow, you made this way too long and overly complicated. Do you get paid by the word?
All anyone needs to do is Google “3-2-1 backup strategy”. It’s that’s simple. It’s not rocket science.
Also, I skimmed of 90% of this because it was superfluous, but did you fail to mention ChronoSync? I have found that to be the best solution in my 35 years as an expert. It has versioning, and works with cloud storage, too.
Finally, for the hardcore coders, you can get the same functionality just using rsync via the terminal or with scripts. It’s free and built-in to the OS.
A backup that is physically detached after the backup will not be affected by a system hack. If the backup is still attached but not mounted, the hack would need to survey all attached disks (via Disk Utility) or its command-line equivalent and then mount each backup disk (and access it with its encryption key if encrypted) to mess with it.
I use CCC to run scheduled backups. CCC has the encryption key for each encrypted volume. It mounts each volume before running the backup and unmounts it afterward. Setting this up using controls in CCC’s dialogs was easy.
Yes, indeed. This is my default mode of operation. For this reason, I consider “duplicates” basically defunct: you can browse and migrate from TM backups just as you would a duplicate, and duplicates are only bootable when you put a lot of work in to keep them current and Apple haven’t broken a system component they’re clearly not all bothered about. So farewell, duplicates.
Definitely not cloud storage - if malware encrypts your data, then that encrypted data is going to get synced to the cloud.
I would say that a local backup strategy that involves APFS snapshots (like Time Machine or CCC) is a good start. Even if your encrypted data gets auto-backed-up, your should retain older snapshots of everything from before the attack. And snapshots are all read-only, so malware can’t encrypt them (although I suppose it might be able to delete them if it can acquire suitable permissions).
One or more off-line storage mechanisms (e.g. clones that are only connected and powered when you’re making backups) can help protect against malware that deletes backups/snapshots. It can’t delete what isn’t connected.
I’d think the ransomware would have to delete the snapshots, else you’d run out of disk storage while it was encrypting.
Time Machine will auto-delete old snapshots as necessary. And yes, if encrypting (and therefore modifying) everything forces it to delete all of the snapshots, that is going to be a critical problem.
Having at least one off-line (or at least manually-generated) backup is a good protection against this.
Using a backup storage device that is at least twice the size of your data is another good option.
FWIW, my Mac has a 2TB storage device, and I’m using about 1TB of it. My backup devices are 4TB drives. So they can hold 3-4 full backups, and a massive number of incremental backups. I chose this size for my backup media primarily because I want to retain a long history, and also because 4TB HDDs aren’t very expensive, but they also help protect against something that creates massive damage to files.
I agree, which why I explicitly called out that need in the article.
First off, there is no widespread ransomware targeting the Mac, so while it’s slightly beyond a theoretical problem, it’s not a real-world issue.
There is immutable cloud storage—that’s how Retrospect protects against ransomware.
The real question revolves around how long ransomware could remain undetected on the assumption that as long as it’s in control, all data being backed up would be encrypted, rendering those backups worthless.
I think you’re probably right in most cases. But, I just had a terrible case where a Western Digital external HD failed – not the drive itself, but the controller or whatever the circuitry is that allows the drive to communicate. Unbeknownst to me, this drive had built-in encryption, meaning that simply putting the drive in a new enclosure did not make it readable. The decryption was built into the failed circuitry. Western Digital told me they couldn’t help and didn’t have their own recovery service. I was SOL unless I was willing to pay a third party drive recovery firm to do some kind of deep-dive recovery effort that would cost thousands of dollars it if worked at all. I couldn’t justify that for my personal files. (There’s another piece to this involving a lost Backblaze backup of the drive, but it’s not worth going into that horror story here…)
For a lot of users of cloud backup, this is a pretty well-hidden threat to their data. Microsoft OneDrive (which we use at work) defaults to, and pushes pretty hard to encourage, keeping only stubs on the local drive. It and other services like Dropbox try to make this as seamless as possible, which is nice in terms of usability – but it also means that aside from a subtle icon alongside a file, it’s not easy to notice that the file isn’t stored locally. I think(?) that software like Carbon Copy Cloner warns users when it encounters these stubs, but the situation is beyond what a lot of casual users can untangle.
CCC actually has a feature to deal with this situation. There’s an advanced setting called “Temporarily download cloud-only files to make a local backup”.
When enabled, CCC will look for these files. For each one found, it will download the file, make a backup, and then evict the local file.
They recommend that you do not do this as a part of a full-system backup, but instead make a separate backup of your cloud storage, which automatically enables this feature, but the feature exists for those who need it.
There are some gotchas, however, so I recommend reading the linked article (below).
See also: CCC: Backing up the content of cloud storage volumes.
Interesting discussion.
One has to wonder if Apple care enough about the whole backups offering they have, or do they essentially just think that iCloud Drive + Time Machine are going to be their good enough solutions for their customers for the foreseeable future?
While iCloud files are of course duplicated in their data-centres, some form of further in-the-cloud backup service might be a future service to sell, perhaps. Though prices would likely have to come down for their cloud-based storage before it’d be viable, me thinks.
I’ve also considered using Backblaze, but subsequently given up on the idea. While they have good sounding solutions to ‘backing up TB’s of everything you own for one small affordable monthly fee’, problems arise when one has to avail themselves of reliable egress (getting your data from them) when it comes to recovering TB’s of data. Some issues I’ve read a lot about:
Egress (re-downloading) data en-masse online is very difficult and prone to repeated failures, eg. Batches are time-consuming, just 0.5TB each, and prone to failures.
Their 8TB HDDs have max 8 drives/year (i.e. 64TB hard limit), the rest have to be kept thus paid for. Making larger backups difficult and expensive.
Recovery is only available from N.American data-centres. So importing those HDDs incurs import duties/taxes on each one for international users. Getting later refunds on those is then time-consuming.
Back-ups often fail.
Their customer service is difficult to deal with if and when said issues arise.
The Reddit forums (among others) have had quite a bit on this over the years, and so I decided against using them, unfortunately. YMMV.
I had a similar experience with an OWC 4 bay enclosure formatted by SoftRaid. SoftRaid started giving warnings about an imminent HDD failure and so I replaced the HDD. But there were more warnings and more HDD replacements. I swopped HDDs around but still the warnings coming. Then I suspected the HDDs were not at fault and tested them on another non-OWC enclosure and formatted using Apple Utility app - no issues still.
It was the controller in the OWC enclosure that was at fault. OWC was not helpful in either replacing the enclosure nor having an app to test OWC enclosures. SoftRaid was not contrite in acknowledging its software was at fault in giving misleading error messages nor any indications of a software fix.
I have been a personal subscriber to Backblaze services for some time and I am based in Australia and so doing very remote off-site backups. Backblaze has managed to handle my ISP changes, computer and external drives replacements, and modifications to file types, etc. Backing-up is done in the background and I am often surprised how immediate these backups are done. There’s not much latency between the keyboard and the backup.
I have had to some online restores from time to time and I haven’t had the issues as you describe. I did one major restore - nearly 8TBs of image files - and that meant having a drive posted to me from the US. All image files restored worked. It did take a little over a week for delivery from the US to Australia, which was a bit of a surprise. For people outside the US, the US postal and courier services are notoriously slow and expensive (China is the benchmark). The one-year free versioning works, but probably not reasonable to do a big restore.
As far as I know, Backblaze data storage has not been compromised and that’s a key requirement for me.
I have not had to contact customer service, in part because I have not had a reason to do so. But the Backblaze website can be a confusing, difficult-to-navigate mess. But that compliant can be levelled about most online service websites these days.
The price one pays for an online backup service depends on the value you attribute to your files.
One thing to mention, databases are not backed up every time a record is updated, correct? I assume my 72GB FileMaker Pro database of work images is not backed up again each time a new record is added. I periodically do a save the database (Save As (compacted)) to a thumb drive. Smaller databases, thanks to this article, are now saved as compacted onto iCloud so I’m working locally and not on the cloud version. (I should script that!)
I believe that is incorrect…when you make a change FM writes that to the file. The file is in use so might not get backed up to BB until you exit the app though.
Not only did I need to be reminded, I need to be instructed. What you describe is not at all what I see. But first, does it matter that I’m using a Time Capsule? (If it does, and I should check if it’s formatted as APFS, please tell me how to do that. I think I got it in 2015, in case that’s significant.)
In case the Time Capsule issue is irrelevant, I’ll continue. I see a sparsebundle file (actually three, apparently for three different logins, on two computers). For each user, I see something like the following for the package contents (although the single login on the one computer does not have the “mapped” directory).
What am I doing wrong? Thanks for insight.
I use Backblaze as well as Time Machine, which is backed up onto a Samsung SSD. I’ve had the SSD for about 4 yrs, assume it’s still fine but don’t know if there’s a way to check or how to know if/when it should be replaced. Looking at the Time Machine backups everything appears fine; is there something I should do to check it?
I also, as a very long-time habit, back up important files as I use them to a flash drive, but I’m wondering if that’s overkill these days. Is that a habit I should finally break? Is the combo of Backblaze & Time Machine enough?
I don’t think anyone has mentioned Growly Backup in this discussion. As I don’t need a bootable backup I have been very satisfied with what Growly Backup provides. I uses it to back up my complete Home folder (in conjunction with Time Machine.) Here is the description from Growly Software:-
To use Backup, you take four steps:
Decide what you want to back up.
For example, you can select your entire Home folder, or your Documents folder, or any other folder or set of folders.
Specify what you don’t need backups of. For example, you may have 100GB of photos, movies, or songs that wouldn’t fit on the backup device or that you back up some other way. Or you may have copies of files kept elsewhere, or that could be easily recreated. You don’t need to waste time and space copying stuff that isn’t important.
Choose a device to back up to. You must set aside an entire device, such as a thumb drive, an external hard drive, or a hard drive partition. You can’t have anything else on that drive or partition, or Backup will not use it.
Run Backup and click the Backup button. Growly Backup makes sure the data on your disk and the backup drive are the same.
To restore files, you just use the Finder. The files and folders on your backup drive are organized in the same way as on your original disk. Find the file on your backup drive and drag it back to your startup disk. That’s all there is to it.
I use a couple of Growly apps other than Backup…I just want to post that even though Growly’s website and interfaces don’t look up-to-the-minute, its software is fine to download and install.
OK, folks, success! Earlier today, I downloaded OS 15.3 from the App Store, then did a clean installation of it onto my M1 Mac Mini. Restarted the Mini from it, then did a migration of all the other “items” from a SuperDuper! backup I had completed 2 days ago. Restarted the Mini, and success into OS 15.3. Lauched SuperDuper!, had it perform a COMPLETE backup of both the System and Data Volumes from the Mini, and I was then able to successfully restart the Mini from that just completed SuperDuper! backup.
As expected, SuperDuper! successfully copied/replicated everything from the Mini, and then having the backup be bootable.
Thus, bootable backups are alive and well again, at least with SuperDuper!. Sure glad we still have some developers like David Nanian who refuse to give up!
I have an event on Calender that reminds me to manually backup to TM every Monday which is sufficient for my data.
Had the exact same success today with my M3 MacBook Air. So glad bootable backups are working again!
One of the reasons I use Arq Backup is that it never deletes backups of external drives. I think from when I looked into it, Backblaze deletes external drive backups if you don’t connect them to your Mac every X days.
Another thing I like about Arq is that you can choose to have your data stored in a European data centre.
Recovery is another question though.
How does Arq work exactly, compared to Backblaze?
e.g. Under pricing it says:
That is for Arq the app. You can just buy the app and use your own cloud storage, local network storage, or attached drive:
â Arq 7 vs Arq Premium
Alternatively you can subscribe to Arq Premium which works similar to Backblaze/CrashPlan/etc in that you get the app and storage combined.
â Arq 7 vs Arq Premium
I use Arq Premium because the storage is reasonably priced (and it keeps things simple). The choice of using a European data centre I mentioned refers to Arq Premium. Obviously if you use Arq with your own separately purchased cloud storage, it will be located wherever you set up that cloud storage.
I use Arq the app with my own storage. To local attached disks on a LAN- attached Mac mini a la network Time Machine; to B2 for most files, also hourly; and to AWS Glacier for media files (photo library and music library and any video files I’ve downloaded.) Glacier is slow (and relatively expensive) to restore from but very, very inexpensive to store to.
I looked at using Glacier for a similar reason (media files) but it seemed like it would be prohibitively expensive to restore from if I ever needed to. But maybe I should reconsider as paying normal rate storage for media files is also expensive.
Thanks for the info. Though pricing is MUCH more expensive than Backblaze’s all-you-can-eat for one fixed price.
Arq Premium costs $72/TB/yr ($6/TB/mth), so if you’ve got even just a few TB’s of stuff, it’s going to get expensive quite quickly.
EDIT: interesting pricing info:
No one really competes with the fixed cost of Backblaze backup, unfortunately.
True, but the trade-off is that there are various ‘gotchas’ with Backblaze where things don’t get backed up or fall out of the backup (certain file types, network shares, external disks not connected frequently enough). I decided I wanted something where I didn’t have to worry about that. I also have a significant number of old Mac files where resource forks and Mac-specific metadata matter, and Backblaze doesn’t handle this well but Arq does.
Note that after the first TB, you only pay for what you’re using, you don’t get charged for a whole extra TB for going over by 1GB.
Not backing up system files and apps obviously helps reduce data requirements. I’m also going to revisit Glacier thanks to @ddmiller’s prompt. And thank you for the link to the Arq page on calculating the cost. I wasn’t aware of that – very useful!
Don’t know what I’m doing differently or if my plan is ‘grandfathered’, but I’m paying $60/year for an annual 1TB Arq Premium plan.
And you’re backing up more than 1TB of data? If so, then you indeed have an undocumented bargain.
Yeah the main $60 includes 1TB; extra TB’s are charged as I previously mentioned per TB (billed per-GB though, so if you use 1.356TB overall, they’ll charge you for just the 356GB extra, not for a full TB).
I think online storage –while not super-expensive of the past– is still relatively expensive compared to how much HDD’s price-per-TB have lowered over time.
The extra software, bandwidth, and non-HDD hardware is pretty much fixed cost (a bay of 100 drive slots is the same price whether populated with 24TB or 4TB HDDs); it’s the HDDs that cost less per-TB over time.
I’m guessing storage companies (Dropbox, iCloud, OneDrive, Amazon, et al.) up-fronted the huge costs, and are now trying to earn the money back from the mass of subscribers to pay back the initial investment costs, while making margins for profit and future reinvestment.
So maybe over the medium to longterm (maybe 5+ years) we’ll see these lower, but not right now.
I was replying to a post the said Arq Premium cost $72/year for 1TB.
As I said, I’m paying $60/year for 1TB. When I did go over, as noted elsewhere, Arq charged me a pro rated amount for the excess. (What I considered to be a reasonable rate: 160+/- GB was < $1/month.) The overage resulted from my failure to tell Arq to limit the total to 1TB by erasing older backups. Since applying that option I’ve had no issues.
Got it. I think @jimthing clarified he was quoting the annual price for one full TB of storage past the included amount, not that he was paying $72/yr for the initial subscription. And your response also reminded me that I need to look at that retention cap…my last monthly bill was almost $18…starting to get back up to what I was paying for CrashPlan!
OK, success again yesterday with SuperDuper! and my 2 bootable backups for my Macs. And that was with OS 15.3.1. Allis well with bootable backups!
After years of religiously making bootable backups I got a new M4 mini last month, when bootable backups were (temporarily, as we now know but didn’t then) out of the picture under 15.2. I didn’t immediately switch from data-only to bootable backups when they came back under 15.3, and this morning had an issue* that could have been solved in an instant if my last night’s backup had been bootable. Instead I lost the whole day in chats & calls with Apple support, who in the end couldn’t resolve it, and now face hours (probably weeks) of laborious manual troubleshooting.
Moral: if you can make a bootable clone, do it. Apple can deprecate it all they like, but I wish to god I’d ignored them harder.
*For the curious, my mini suddenly only recognises two of the three connected displays at a time; the HDMI one is only recognised if I disconnect one of the Thunderbolt ones. (But this thread isn’t the place for bright ideas on that!)
Thanks for that! I’ve been preaching this on all 3 of these discussions, and some folks kind of “bash” me. But your post is definitely appreciated! And it just reinforces what I have been saying about bootable backups.
Just to restate, SuperDuper! (SD) is currently the only program that produces such backups. For CCC and ChronoSync, it is “hit and miss”. One thing though is that when doing the backup, make sure the external device is not plugged into the DFU port. SD will still do the backup if it is plugged into that port, but it will not be bootable.
Also, it’s wise to keep your Mac “lean, mean, and clean”, to make sure just about everything functions fine, including using SD.
Enough preaching, enough restating, enough criticizing Carbon Copy Cloner and ChronoSync. As far as I’m aware, they and SuperDuper do equally good jobs making bootable backups using asr. Make sure to test any bootable backup you make to ensure that it can actually boot your Mac given the known bugs in 15.3’s asr with recreating caches that prevent some backups from booting. If that’s the case, it can be fixed by reinstalling macOS over the backup’s copy.
I just discovered another reason to turn on the extended version history in Backblaze, which is that it seems to make Backblaze more relaxed about external drives that aren’t always available. I have several archive drives, and although Backblaze generally asks me to turn them on every 14 days, I apparently missed a notification and one went 30 days, triggering this message, which says that I don’t have to worry about losing the backup contents because of keeping it offline for longer than 14 days.