It’s a great article, but high performance is not necessary for Time Machine. TM is designed to run in the background without impacting foreground system performance. As such, you don’t need a high performance device for that application.
I continue to recommend price and capacity over performance for storage devices that are intended for use with Time Machine or other backup systems.
Now, if you’re shopping for external storage to be used for live work, and not for backups or archival storage, then that’s a completely different question. A high performance device may help out quite a bit in those scenarios.
TM is designed to run in the background without impacting foreground system performance.
I know this is supposed to be the case, but I can always tell when processes start slowing down (especially Finder processes) and I can look up and see that TM is running. For the amount I use my computer, I have it set to run once a day.
But what if you want to recover a file from several months back? I have my Time Machine on spinning tin, and my experience is that it’s quite useless to check the state of items more than several weeks back.
Indeed HDDs (especially HDDs with APFS) are a poor medium these days. But an SSD will be more than adequate for TM purposes. It doesn’t have to be a fast SSD or interfaced over TB4. It just needs to be any reasonable SSD and performance will be adequate both for TM backup as well as restoring individual files/folders from that TM backup or entire restores via MA.
In a nutshell: for TM avoid HDDs if you can (eg. unless you need such huge capacity that SSDs become prohibitively expensive). Get flash memory (SSD) instead. Buy flash and enclosure/bridge separately since putting the two together is trivial yet most cost effective and more flexible. Finally, do get an SSD for good performance, but don’t bother with top performance flash, fancy bridges or TB4 bus.
For TM purposes any decent flash (just one example of which we have dozens in good use here) in a decent 10 Gbps USB3 bridge (here’s a good example) and you’ll be fine. For TM (where macOS throttles anyway) the only disadvantage of this route is no SMART (because of USB, would require TB on a Mac) but that’s negligible IMHO. Cost savings OTOH and considerable.
That has all already been covered extensively above. I hope we can now lay this to rest.
I don’t think I’ve ever looked back more than a week or two. Yes, it’s slower than I’d like but I don’t use the feature very often.
If you know the date you want to look at, however, you don’t need to go through the TM interface. You can double-click open the TM device from the Finder. You’ll see an icon for each snapshot (that is, each dae that’s been backed up). You can then open the snapshot(s) you like and locate the file you want to examine.
I agree with you and disagree with recommending an SSD for TM…they’re still more expensive than spinning drives and yes, APFS is less than fully efficient with spinning drives…but speed of access really isn’t important for TM’s use and the size/price benefits make spinning drives better for TM IMO.
In a perfect world…sure, SSDs are the wave of the future and are ‘better’…but remember the old adage about better being the enemy of good enough.
Well, decrypting the Time Machine drive was a VERY BAD idea!!! Now Time Machine won’t back up because the drive is decrypted! And I don’t see a way to encrypt again. (When i right click on the drive, decrypt is grayed out and there is no encrypt.)
Now what do I do to get the Time Machine to run again? I thought about erasing, but I don’t want to make things worse.
So please tell me what I need to do to get the Crucial SSD Time Machine drive to work again. Again, please be specific in the details —I just don’t trust myself to figure what to do.
TM shouldn’t care about decrypted vs. encrypted. Have you tried removing the disk from TM and then selecting it again as a backup target (using the little + and - buttons), answering yes to the query if it shall inherent the previous backups?
Just curious — when the Time Machine was encrypted with a password., it would NOT save to Keychain nor 1Password unless I put in a website. What website would you use? Or is there a different way to save the password?
Dismount the Time Machine drive, disconnect it, then plug the drive back in. If the drive’s password isn’t already in your keychain, you’ll be prompted for it – and a box should be there that will allow you to save the password in the Keychain.
The password for the drive appears in your Keychain with the name of the drive and Kind of “encrypted volume password” (I believe this holds for Monterey and later). There’s no need to create another entry for if you’ve already asked the FInder to save the disk password for you.
As far as using 1Password to track the password, you could always use a secure note, or a Password type of entry with a fake username (the Password type doesn’t require you to put in a URL).
I have been using rather cheap USB mechanical HDDs as TimeMachine storage over the years. There has been som issues but nothing major and as many people here has stated the backups are running in the background and doesn’t require that high speed.
I don’t know why, but the mechanical drives has become more noisy of the years (while the Mac computers have become more or less silent) and I found the noise disturbing. So now I have switched to an SSD drive. So far no issues and it is thankfully completely silent. I think the sound from a mechanical drive alone is a good reason to go to SSD
Interesting. I’ve found that the portable laptop-style drives are virtually silent.
But the 3.5" drives are clearly audible. And the ones I’ve been buying recently (Toshiba), significantly so.
I think some of this is because people buying 3.5" drives are typically installing them in a server or NAS, where the noise doesn’t matter as much. And also a drive inside a minitower (like my old PowerMac) is much harder to hear than a drive in a USB enclosure on top of your desk.
I have six 4TB Seagate portable hard drives that I use on a regular basis, along with a handful of portables (some of them quite old) with smaller capacities. All of them are totally silent when I’m using them.
