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.
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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!
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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:
- App only — use your own cloud storage
That is for Arq the app. You can just buy the app and use your own cloud storage, local network storage, or attached drive:
- Amazon S3
- Backblaze B2
- Google Cloud Storage
- Google Drive
- Dropbox
- OneDrive
- SharePoint
- Wasabi
- Minio
- DigitalOcean Spaces
- Synology or other NAS
- attached hard drive
Alternatively you can subscribe to Arq Premium which works similar to Backblaze/CrashPlan/etc in that you get the app and storage combined.
Arq Premium is a subscription service that includes the Arq app for up to 5 computers plus:
- built-in cloud storage
- web access to your files so you can retrieve files when you don’t have your computer with you
An Arq Premium subscription includes the Arq app (and all updates) plus 1 TB of storage and up to 5 computers. (Additional storage usage is billed monthly per GB over 1 TB).
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.
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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.
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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!
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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. 
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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.
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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! 
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