Do You Use It? Backup Strategies Span the Gamut

Originally published at: https://tidbits.com/2025/01/16/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.

DYUI backup strategy poll results

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.)

Finder Trash setting

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.

Time Machine in the Finder

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).

Backblaze version history

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 IDriveand Carbonite, but I haven’t used them.

Backblaze interface

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.

3 Likes

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.

1 Like

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. :slight_smile:

5 Likes

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

1 Like

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.

4 Likes

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:

  • SSD pricing (M.2 form factor only)
    • 250 GB: $25
    • 500 GB: $35-73
    • 1 TB: $56-200
    • 2 TB: $110-253
    • 4 TB: $250-330
    • 8 TB: $680-980
  • HDD pricing (2.5" (laptop) form factor)
    • 1 TB: $53
    • 2 TB: $75
  • HDD pricing (3.5" form factor)
    • 2 TB: $60-80
    • 4 TB: $135-155
    • 6 TB: $139-220
    • 8 TB: $135-270
    • 10 TB: $176-249
    • 12 TB: $219-240
    • 14 TB: $240-320
    • 16 TB: $285-470
    • 18 TB: $313-380
    • 20 TB: $342-400
    • 22 TB: $419-450
    • 24 TB: $440-570

If we compare the highest and lowest prices without regard to brands and specs, we see the differences between HDD and SSD to be:

  • < 1TB: Not available as HDD
  • 1TB: $3-147
  • 2TB: $30-193
  • 4 TB: $95-195
  • 8 TB: $410-845
  • > 8TB: Not available as SSD

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.

4 Likes

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.

1 Like

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. :slightly_smiling_face:

Dave

3 Likes

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?

3 Likes

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: https://blinksandbuttons.net/how-many-gb-is-a-movie/

3 Likes

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.)

1 Like

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.

1 Like

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?

2 Likes

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. :slight_smile:

2 Likes

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!