Really, I’d guess this would likely be best for most people on more recent T2/M1 devices to encrypt by default, given the latter point (theft/stolen) is something that could happen to almost anyone – and obviously more so for moveable devices like laptops.
So then the real issue is this one:
How much of a problem is this, when one is deciding?
Kind of a catch 22 situation…
Encrypt to stop access from third-parties, but in doing so, should some technical problem happen with the TM backup and you trying to access it in future; you’re completely screwed, as the data is rendered completely unrecoverable due to its said encryption. Not great options. :-(
Having just lost a third WD HD without warning I’m planning on following @Simon’s advice and getting a Samsung 4TB with Eluteng case for my iMac. It has been so frustrating thinking I was getting a TM backup that I can rely on. I’m looking to upgrade my OS and need to be sure I have one I can trust.
This particular one was a 4tb My Passport. I forget what the others were but all failed the First Aid run on Disk Utility several times. I’m running Catalina on an iMac 2019. Some of the drives I could fix with First Aid, reformat and they ran for a good while before giving up.
I also have three drives (1 HD, 2 SSD) that I swap for Carbon Copy Clone backups and also have BackBlaze Forever. I also keep most of my important research, etc. files on DropBox. You can tell I’m a bit paranoid about losing data lol.
Concern right now is I want to migrate to Big Sur to be able to use some newer updates of some of my programs. Not looking forward to that though.
No, First Aid ran fine. It was when it finished. I erased it and ran First Aid again and if failed despite showing disk was OK when erased. Went through this several times and it was clearly lost. Thanks anyway.
Which is why it’s aways a good idea to back up to multiple disks. This is of course true also for HDDs.
Every disk (SSD and HDD) will eventually fail. You can knock down probability of that happening to some extent by buying serious hardware and keeping things reasonably up to date, but what you really need to do is make sure you have a plan B when that does happen. A second (and third, fourth, …) backup disk is invaluable as such.
I have no personal experience, but DriveSavers says they can recover data from an SSD. I once toured their facility and they can do some truly impressive stuff.
DriveSavers is a pretty decent data recovery service, but they are very expensive.
I’ve seen enough data recovery videos from iPad Rehab and Louis Rossmann that I don’t think their services are unique or worth the prices they charge.
That having been said, data recovery will always be a significant expense, no matter where you go. It’s always better to have backups so you don’t need to recover anything in the event of a failure.
A less expensive first step would be to try SpinRite by GRC (Steve Gibson). Often very effective, and may be all you need. (Current version needs to run on a PC, but next version will boot on Intel Macs)
Robust it may be, but apparently, there are some edge cases in which Time Machine using APFS (TMA) can eat up a lot of disk space and thereby make it a poor choice:
For the great majority of users, snapshots are a valuable enhancement and cause no problems. But for a few, if they’re not carefully managed, they can eat so much free space that it affects their work. Instead of just deleting them, you need to discover the cause and address that. In a very few cases, it could mean that using snapshots as part of your backup strategy isn’t a good idea, in which case Time Machine isn’t a good choice. Thankfully, such cases should be rare.
This is far more important for local snapshots (of your Data volume), where large temporary files may consume a lot of space you would rather be freed. But those snapshots will self-destruct in 24 hours.
Snapshots on a TM volume are not the same, because the same files will cause a TMH volume to retain the storage. The fact that it TMH does it with many hard-links to a file instead of with snapshots doesn’t really change anything unless you decide to start manually deleting individual files from within your a TMH backups.
Indeed, Howard Oakley says as much in today’s post:
Which ends with this advice:
There’s an important lesson for us with respect to apps which make snapshots, like Time Machine and Carbon Copy Cloner. Where you have large files which change a great deal but don’t need to be backed up as frequently, don’t simply exclude them from your backups, but put them on a separate volume which doesn’t have snapshots taken. This could apply to folders of temporary and cached data, Virtual Machines, downloads perhaps, even databases and Photos libraries. There’s something to be said for a user-equivalent to the hidden VM volume.
Yes. But this advice about large files applies to any backup strategy that maintains historic backups, whether or not snapshots are the mechanism used.
For myself, I keep a folder (aptly named ~/Not backed up), which is on Time Machine’s exclude list. I keep in there things like VM disk images and my Audacity projects, which would consume a lot of space if part of a TM backup. These files only get backed up when I make clones with CCC. This way, they don’t cause premature clobbering of TM history due to snapshots consuming too much space.
Yes, they may result in my CCC backups not maintaining as much history they would otherwise, but I usually don’t care about historic data on those backups beyond maybe the last month or so.
And my backup drives are plenty big (2x the total capacity of my Mac’s storage and almost 3x the size of my data), so I’m really not too worried about it.
I have a MacBook m1 and I use an external HDD spinny drive for time machine. I have it formatted as APFS and I find Time Machine terribly sluggish. My computer is amazingly fast though. My connection is USB3. It’s a Seagate drive with 8TB. A few months after getting my mac, I noticed that time machine wasn’t backing up. I could see the data on the drive. I could not get time machine to work. I ran disk utility and it said there were errors that could not be fixed. I immediately took another drive and ran time machine on it all night long. It successfully backed up. I don’t remember the exact order of events, but I contacted apple support. They didn’t know what to do. They said there was no other way to fix the first drive without erasing it. I did, knowing I had a fresh time machine backup. After erasing the drive, it would no longer mount. Additionally, after plugging in my fresh backup, it also would no longer mount. I could see the drive container in Disk Utility but couldn’t use first aid, couldn’t erase and couldn’t mount. I got a brand new 8TB drive and it’s been backing up fine for a couple months and then yesterday I got a notification that it had not backed up in 28 days. I forced a backup, which started off saying it was going to take 2 hours and ended up taking about 12. It did complete. I ran disk utility and I’m getting the same error message that I got the first time.
I’m just wondering if APFS should not be used on the spinning drives. Or if my drive is actually Ok and disk utility is wrong? Is there another disk utility application that I can use to test it? Should I change the format back to HFS+? I realize that I lose the data if I do this.
Performing fsck_apfs -y -x /dev/disk4s2
error: container /dev/rdisk5 is mounted.
Storage system check exit code is 65.
Storage system verify or repair failed. : (-69716)
So, I tried time machine and it does work, but as I started this message, it is very sluggish. When I try to go back in time, the window goes dark grey and empty for about 5 seconds and then snaps to the new date. Gone is the nice animation.
Steve
Your problems are not likely related to APFS per se. Apple recommends APFS for TM backups for any macOS since Big Sur. That recommendation makes a lot of sense, just see Howard Oakley’s articles I linked to at the very top of this thread. There is for HDDs indeed a performance penanlty related to APFS use vs. HFS+, however, that penalty usually does not apply to disks used for TM backups. And of course, your issue is not performance but reliability.
Disk Utility does have a bug in that it claims it cannot fix a backup disk, when actually it just cannot properly unmount all the backups on that disk first. So what you really need to do is use Disk Utility on your TM disk in Recovery Mode. Do that first to confirm if indeed there’s an issue with your disk. More details below.
But note also that, according to the Eclectic Light blog posts, the problem seems to be with the Disk Utility GUI tool, not the underlying fsck_apfs utility that it calls under the covers.
The problem is that Disk Utility won’t umount/remount the Time Machine volume and all its snapshots, so it can’t perform a normal check/repair. And it doesn’t pass-in the -l option that is required to check (without any repairing) a “live” volume.
If you’re comfortable with the command-line, something like this should work:
$ sudo fsck_apfs -n -l /dev/disk4s2
Note that it will take a very long time to run, because it will check all of the volume’s snapshots, and Time Machine will have one for every backup stored on the volume. So it may take several hours or even days to complete. And if it finds any problems, it will report them but will not attempt repair (because the volume is still mounted).
If it finds problems and you want to attempt repair, you should boot into Recovery mode and run Disk Utility from there. Without TM running in the background it should work. But again, it will take a long time to complete, due to all the snapshots.
You can speed up the process using the -S option (telling it to not check the snapshots), but there’s really no point in doing that on a Time Machine volume. The snapshots are the entire reason for the volume’s existence - if you don’t check them and there’s an unreported problem as a result, then you’ll have a corrupted backup and not know it.
Regarding comparing HDD vs SSD for Time Machine on APFS:
SSDs should be preferred over hard disks for storing Time Machine backups on APFS. Hard disk performance and working life are seriously impaired when APFS is used.