Do You Use It? What’s Your Backup Strategy

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I use Time Machine and Backblaze for ongoing backups. Backblaze also backs up the external hard drives that are always connected to my computer. I have one hard drive for work archives and another for ALL my personal archives, photos, etc. (The oldest stuff started on floppy discs, was copied to Iomega Zip Discs, then to CDs/DVDs, and now is consolidated onto one of those external hard drives.) That covers Versioned and Internet Backups.

Some of my work is on Dropbox, so that’s also on the Cloud.

Then I make two copies of everything (computer and external hard drives) using SuperDuper. I checked “nightly duplicate” but I don’t make duplicates nightly, more like monthly-ish or before I travel.

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In 1978 I became the first third-party developer hired by Apple Computer. Been using Apple products for the past 46 years, but retired from development in 2011. Now I do a lot of photo and video work, and my setup is a Mac Studio with 3 external 8TB nVME drives - one for active working, and one for holding files. (The other is mostly empty, but used for an hourly work backup.) I have an even larger number of spinners to back up my entire 5TB of apps and data.

I use TM to backup my Studio drive (about 500 GB) to a spinner, and Carbon Copy Cloner with scheduled tasks to back up the work and data drives. Work is backed up hourly to a volume on the third 8TB nVME (so it’s very quick), as well as every two hours to a spinner.

At night I have scheduled a full backup all 5TB to various spinning drives so that I have at least two copies of everything.

Finally, I keep a 8TB spinner with all 5TB of my setup in a fireproof container stored on the floor beneath a steel shelf.

The only true disaster I had was 40 years ago when I lost everything due to a drive crash (as I recall). I became a devotee of backups from that moment on.

I’m cautious and in the past four decades have only had to deal with a few restores, mostly caused by corrupted preference files. I also have literally dozens of disconnected spinners with various backups, from data to photos, videos, writings and so on.

One can accumulate a LOT of stuff over 46 years, eh?

Regards

Tracy Valleau
www.ItsThePrint.com

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43

Just to add to the excellent post by @bob.fairbairn , I have read plenty of people who have had online cloud service accounts (especially iCloud) canceled with very few options for account recovery. So in that case, things stored in iCloud Drive, iCloud Photos, iCloud mail accounts, were lost forever.

I always make sure that sync service items are downloaded to at least one computer and that they are backed up well, with restores tested at least once per year.

But to counter one thing that Bob said,

I can’t tell you how many times I have thought I wouldn’t need something anymore, deleted it, and then ended up restoring it months or years later. So I always think it’s always best to back it up just in case.

That said: I was just the other day going through my iCloud Drive and saw some files and folders I know I will never need again, so I did a quick pruning then and will spend some time soon looking more closely to see if there are more items I can prune.

This was at least 25 years ago, maybe as much as 30 years ago. I was working for a small company that had a Netware file server running on an HP server with a five disk hot-swappable RAID5 array. We always kept a spare drive around, and two or three different times we had a drive failure in the array. Because it was hot-swappable, we were able to remove the bad drive, put in the new one, and let the RAID rebuild itself.

One day we had a failure. Because server performance was poor while the array was rebuilding, we decided to risk waiting until the end of the day to swap the drive. Official office hours were 8:00 until 4:30, and though of course plenty of people stayed after 4:30, it was a much smaller set of people. So at 4:30 I did an incremental backup of the server and, when the backup completed, I swapped the drive.

The wrong drive.

As careful as I was to make sure that I knew which drive to swap; despite triple-checking to make sure I was pulling the right one, I pulled the wrong one. The server immediately made me very aware that it was not happy. I tried reinstalling the drive I had just pulled, but it was too late - the RAID was corrupted and could not be rebuilt, because one drive had failed and one drive was missing.

So I had to replace the correct drive, wipe the array, reinstall Netware, and start the restore from our DLT tape drive (thankfully with a robotic tape changer.) I stayed until the restore was complete and I could verify that everything was working right, including the Groupwise mail system. The restore finished at 8:15 am the following morning and I let everyone back on at 8:45.

That was one long night.

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Yes, this I why I mentioned creating my own backups of Photos, kindle and audible content, etc.

One thing I like about Dropbox (and hate about the new tendency of “file provider apps” to not automatically download things to drives) is that my files are all duplicated locally (I use Maestral instead of the Dropbox app so everything is always on my local drives). This means I have a copy in the cloud, plus copies on each computer, plus a backup of those files via BackBlaze.

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Not sure what a “manual backup using the Finder” implies. I backup to an external SSD using SuperDuper (or CarbonCopy in the past) weekly. That’s manual. I should add that I am doing this with Catalina.

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A few times, fortunately, none recently. I have been a fan of tape backup for a long time and I’ve had tape drives until drives of sufficient capacity became too expensive. That having been said, there were two times I needed them to recover a system.

Once was back in the 90’s when I was running OS/2. Something glitched and made my system unbootable. I booted a recovery floppy (minimal installation of OS/2, including the device drivers for my SCSI DAT drive). From there, I reformatted the hard drive and restored my backup (an OS/2 port of the Unix tar utility). I was back up and running in a few hours.

The second time was in 2004. I was using a PowerMac G4 (Quicksilver-2002) with two hard drives. My primary boot volume became corrupted due to a bad interaction between Tech Tool Pro and a flaky USB 2.0 card, even though I was booted from an internal IDE drive. I booted from an “emergency recovery” partition I had previously created on my second hard drive. From there, I wiped the primary hard drive and used Retrospect to restore it from my tape backup (an Exabyte VXA-1 drive). It took several hours (and a tape swap), but after that, everything was working correctly again.

That second incident actually won me a prize. Several months later, Exabyte ran an ad campaign asking for people to send in their stories about how their VXA drive saved the day. I sent them my story and they apparently liked it, because I won an iPod Mini for it.

Over the years, I have used several different kinds of tape drives:

Sadly, when my storage requirements grew too large for two VXA tapes, I was forced to switch to other media, because high capacity tape drives just cost too much.

Today, the smallest tape drive capable of storing 2TB without compression (e.g. for backing up my current Mac) would be an LTO-6 drive. The smallest LTO drive you can buy today, however is LTO-7 (6 TB uncompressed capacity) and those drives cost thousands of dollars, and most have SAS interfaces, which are not Mac compatible (but I was able to find a few with Thunderbolt interfaces, e.g., the Symply PRO LTO-7. But far far too expensive for personal use.

So I’ve been forced to make my backups using external hard drives for the last 20 years or so, which doesn’t make me happy, but is the only cost-effective option.

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Since this topic has received a lot of input, and I’ve seen comments like “so and so hasn’t posted in the past xx months,” I felt it was important to join the conversation!

Honestly, I don’t see a reason for incremental backups for anything I do. Most long-term document storage is in iCloud, and some random synaptic misfires are kept in Notion. I’ve long moved away from the mindset of capturing and storing things just to look at them in the future.
I never have.

I have found solace in emptying my thoughts into Amplenote. Whether I need something in the future is irrelevant. It simply feels good to use this as my personal pensieve.

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Wow. You have some serious PTSD from that floppy disk that was left on the radiator overnight. :grinning:

Great write-up!

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I recently switched back to a Mac after 20 years on Windows for my personal computing. My backup routine is a mashup of what I used to do on Windows and the “Apple way.”

  • I store key documents in my OneDrive folder — especially ones I might need to access remotely on mobile devices. (I get 1TB of storage with my Microsoft subscription.)
  • I use Time Machine with two solid-state drives (one always hooked up; one connected weekly).
  • I use FreeFileSync to backup (technically an “update” sync) key folders (e.g. Documents, Pictures, BusyCal) daily to a different SSD. Monthly, I run a “mirror” sync to delete orphaned files on the backup drive.
  • I use EaseUS Todo Backup to create image backups of my Documents folder (weekly), Family Photos (monthly/ad-hoc), and Home Movies (ad-hoc). I save these on the external SSD and then manually upload the backup image files to OneDrive on the web (these are not synced with my Mac’s OneDrive folder). I used Arq Backup at one point for cloud backup on Windows but didn’t like how it worked.
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My last file restore was only 5 days ago: I was using a new-to-me Mac app to tile, for printing, a PDF map I had downloaded months ago. Unfortunately, it overwrote the original with the multiple page tiles unexpectedly under File > Save ( I thought I was saving tile settings).

This was all on my iCloud volume. Browse Time Machine Backups took a minute or so to bring up the earlier versions, but they were there, and I restored easily.

I like to imagine a long row of ancient IBM tape drives winding back to locate my files :-)

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I don’t currently make nightly duplicates, but I pretty frequently use Super Duper!. But I don’t make bootable backups, I always use it to backup to a disk image instead of a drive. Last time I made one was a few weeks ago when I got my new M4 mac mini and wanted to clone my old Mac before sending to my brother. I had my time machine backups and my backblaze backups, but i wanted something close with EVERYTHING unencrypted on it (my time machine backups are encrypted). just in case.

Typically I use an external SSD drive I have formatted ExFAT then create a disk image on it in APFS and have Super Duper backup to that.

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I have owned 4 desktop Macs and 4 laptops. Every one of the desktops has suffered a hardware failure…

  • Power Macintosh 8500: died as unbootable. I thought I was safe, because I regularly backed up to DDS tapes with Retrospect: 3 tapes in rotation, one offsite, every month took one tape out of rotation and added another. But, the DDS drive used SCSI. Guess what port was missing from a 2008 iMac? Fortunately after a lot of struggle*, I got it to boot one last time and transferred the data.
  • 24" iMac 3.06 Ghz: Died of graphics system failure. I think I manually transferred data from a clone to the new computer.
  • iMac (27-inch, Late 2019): Video started going wacky, so I bought a new iMac. As I was attempting to use the Migration Assistant to transfer the data from that iMac to a new iMac, it wouldn’t boot. The SSD in the Fusion Drive died! So I migrated from a Time Machine backup. My mistake was I didn’t run a Time Machine backup right before starting the migration, so I wasn’t completely up to date. Which brings us to…

iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2017), which I’ve had to use backups three times, at least:

  • After upgrading to Catalina, the SSD component of the Fusion Drive started showing a SMART test failure. I thought that it was a false alert, but it had the effect of blocking an upgrade to Big Sur. So the work around was to boot to an external bootable clone and then apply Big Sur there. I was going to then clone back to the internal drive, but ran into a problem with asr. So I just kept running using the external drive, which was faster than the internal anyway.
  • After the SSD drive was repaired, I couldn’t just clone back for the same reason. So the work-around was to do a clean install of Big Sur on the internal Fusion Drive, then re-cloned the Data volume from the backup drive (which I was booted from) to the internal drive.
  • In October the HD component of the Fusion Drive suddenly crashed, hard. It is completely non-functional. Fix was to boot from the external bootable clone, and then bring it up to date by restoring some recent updates from Time Machine. And in a few cases, I had to pull files down from the cloud using Arq. I’m still running from that clone, and plan to until I get a new computer.

Now that I think about it, I think I had to take a MacBook Pro in for in-warranty repair. Apple of course wiped the hard drive and installed a different version of OS X. When I got the computer back I restored by cloning from a backup. I can’t remember if I booted from the backup, or cloned by connecting the MBP to my iMac in Target Disk Mode.

So I’ve used the full complement of backups: bootable and non-bootable clones, in quite a few ways. Time Machine. Migration Assistant. Cloud backups. I also recover from mistakes – Oops! I shouldn’t have deleted that! – by restoring files from Time Machine.

* I finally got it to boot by removing the CPU cache!

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Wow this is a massive thread with lots of good points!
Been computing since the 80’s, today with a MBP that can use bootable backups so that one gets CCC bootables to HDD and SSD drives, and TM to alternating HDDs.
A newish MBA also in use gets TM to repurposed HDD and CCC data only to an SSD.
What I didn’t notice in a quick read of the thread, is what to do when operating from a bootable backup. That is, now there are changes on that volume that maybe should be backed up.
Way back, maybe in the 90s, I had HDDs on Macs die and paid royally for retrieval to CD/DVD. Then followed TidBITS advice with SD/CCC and TM backups and only needed to use them when Apple repaired MPBs in a way that left them unusable without the bootable backups.
Most memorably and perhaps worthy of others’ consideration, my widely traveling, self employed wife’s MPB SSD died while traveling in a remote location (well away from an Apple Store or commonly served by delivery services)! I was able to upload some files from home for her project, and some she had just started so didn’t lose too much time recreating on a PC loaned by the client. Project files she saved to a USB chip.
Back at base she used the chip files and a colleague’s PC to work for some weeks til a scheduled trip home. Got her MPB repaired, set it up from an oldish bootable backup, added the fresh files from the chip and backed it all up the usual way.
Now she is saving some critical files on Dropbox, for access from any OS, and with a new MPB data only CCCs to SSD while on the road and that plus TM and data only CCCs when here at base. So if the new MPB dies-stolen etc, Dropbox is there, iPhone is there with all her pinging apps, she can keep on truckin’ til nearer an Apple obtaining location. Still, I am not sure she’d be able to do the migration but I could probably guide via Facetime or similar. Then maybe by Screen Sharing set up her Settings and answer questions about how newer OS affects her usual work method, (getting a bit ranty here; skip if needed) as the new MBP would be on a newer OS with all its snooping and other rubbish settings in place. It would not be easy or fun but at least she could keep working.
This is one of the dilemmas of data only backup, one would be forced into latest OS, losing use of paid, valid and comfortable old software and forced to learn new things and forced into subscription software.
The loss of bootables means guaranteed disruption. Maybe fine for flexible young people but for those with established work methods trying to finish up careers, a real time eater and frustration.
On the bright side, hardware has become pretty reliable! on the downside, theft and damage are still there… sigh.

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Just to set the record straight, Discourse autosaves everything you write in your account until you press the Reply button, so you can close the browser window and return later to your draft or even switch to another device.

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Using the Finder to drag a file to an external drive to make a copy.

That’s an excellent point. In the past, you could recopy the bootable backup back to the internal storage (a new drive or a new Mac), but I would be very hesitant to do that on a M-series Mac. There I’d use Migration Assistant pointed at that bootable backup during setup.

Realistically, I was always uncomfortable with restoring a bootable backup to a new Mac because I was never entirely certain that Apple wouldn’t customized the macOS install in some way for the specific Mac.

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This was the standard for 68K, PPC and Intel Macs before Big Sur.

It’s my understanding, however, that this is not reliable for modern versions of macOS and won’t work at all on Apple Silicon.

For a modern Mac, the “solution” is to use Configurator or Recovery to clean-install macOS, then use Migration Assistant from your bootable backup.

Could you clone the backed-up Data volume over the newly-installed Data volume? I think it should work, especially if the two systems have the same version of macOS, but I’d be concerned about possibly breaking the firmlinks that tie the System and Data volumes together.

Agreed. In the days of Classic Mac OS, installations would be customized for the hardware. Restoring to a different hardware model may not work reliably.

However, the Mac OS installers did provide the option to “Install for all Macintoshes” (vs. “Install for this Macintosh”) which would make a system bootable on everything supported by that version of Mac OS.

Of course, back then, the differences were pretty much limited to the set of system extensions, “enablers” control panels and apps installed, so a mismatched system would still work, but with some features possibly missing or not working.

I think (but I’m not sure) that all installations of Mac OS X (on PPC and Intel) were universal, so a system installed on one Mac would boot on anything else.

But with the introduction of Apple Silicon, Apple went back. As I understand it, installations are for only one CPU architecture (Intel or Apple Silicon), although they might be compatible with all supported devices within that architecture.

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I have and older version of SuperDuper and I still use CCC, although its utility is questionable, given it can no longer make bootable backups. I use ChronoSync to synchronize my wife’s and my high-res music and movie files, effectively using both as backups. We also share 2TB of iCloud storage, which synchronizes data across our Macs, iPhones and iPads. I have TimeMachine and Backblaze internet incremental backups on both our Macs, both of which have saved our asses in the past.

Yes, I have several backup strategies in use. I’m paranoid, thanks to a major data loss when I was a graduate student, in which I lost 2 weeks worth of work. It could have been worse, but at least I had a backup.

The loss of having a bootable backup was brought home a few months ago when a failed update bricked my M1 Mac Studio. It was a minor update, I think from Sequoia 1.1 to 1.1.0.1 or the like. The update hung up and when it failed to make progress after giving it all day, I reluctantly forced a shutdown. After that, the Mac wouldn’t boot up - not even into recovery mode. Nothing at all would display on attempting to boot. The best advice I could obtain from Apple’s online support was to schedule a Genius Bar appointment and bring it in. Thankfully, a fellow user replied to my post and sent me a link to the appropriate article.

I was able to recover my Mac and finish the update by hooking it up to my wife’s M3 iMac via a Thunderbolt cable, but not until I updated my wife’s computer to the newest version of Sequoia. Without the second M-Series Mac, I would have had no choice but to take my Mac to the nearest Apple Store. Had I had a bootable backup, I would have been back up and running in a matter of hours. I understand the security concerns, but Apple could facilitate a secure, bootable backup procedure if they wanted to. That said, this was the first catastrophic failure I’ve experienced in 3½ decades of experience with Macs.

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For as long as I can remember, I have been making daily Time Machine backups manually. I have never felt the need to make hourly backups. In addition, I used to make daily SuperDuper backups; but nowadays, I clone my startup disk with SuperDuper every few days, or whenever I have done any work that needs to be protected. My contacts and calendars—as well as my Notes, where I do all of my writing—are also on my iPhone and iPad Pro, which are also backed up regularly. Nowadays, most of my creative work is done on my iPad, but all of that work is also copied to my Mac whenever anything new is finished. In summary, I would say that I backup my data much more conscientiously than some people, but not as redundantly as others. This works for me. I haven’t had to erase and restore my data due to a computer meltdown for many years.

I should also mention that I have kept the lion’s share of my music, photos and videos on external drives for many years; and I keep two backups (for a total of three copies) of every file that I wish to protect against loss. This strategy saves me the expense of ordering large, expensive internal SSDs for my computers. It also makes my computer backups fast and easy, and the backups occupy a relatively modest amount of external storage space.

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I’m in the process of switching all my external drives from HDDs to SSDs, except the drives I use for offsite backups. I run a default Time Machine backup for my boot drive, and now that the TM drive is in APFS, it’s easy to check the archives in the Finder rather than the TM interface.

However, my primary system for potential restoration is a 3 a.m. scheduled backup via CCC of my boot drive, which triggers a CCC backup of my media drive. Now that everything is on USB-C-connected SSDs, everything completes in a few minutes at most.

This morning, an email notification indicated an error in the boot drive backup. In the past, these messages had been caused by a write-ahead log for an internal SQL-lite database disappearing between the time CCC created a snapshot and attempted to copy the file to the backup. These were of no consequence. However, this morning’s error indicated an issue with some attributes for a library file. I ran the backup (which is easy to do when it takes a minute or so) and got the same error. When I excluded the file from the backup, a similar error appeared for a different file. So, I suspected disk corruption. I then rebooted the computer in Recovery mode and ran Disk First Aid from Disk Utility on the data portion of the boot drive. DFA showed numerous warnings and errors before cleaning things up. I successfully rebooted and reran CCC with no errors.

So, CCC proved helpful in alerting me to a drive issue before it caused problems with hard data.

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I have TimeMachine on the laptop, AND I use Carbon Copy Cloner to copy (every day) my home directory over to another machine (on an external RAID array drive.) That machine also has TimeMachine enabled. As I see it, this gives me 3 layers of protection, using 2 different mechanisms. (I think ‘2 mechanisms’ is important, if for no other reason, I once lost significant data with a backup system that I mis-configured.)