Good portable backup drive for a 4TB Mac?

TidBITS Talk
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What would be a good portable drive (brand & size) to back up my new Mac that has a 4T drive with Time Machine?

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How much data are you intending to back up? 4TB?

Are you in the “Time Machine drives are OK to be HDD”, or “Time Machine is so much faster on SSD” camp?

Do you intend for the drive to be only used for Time Machine?

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Yes, Michael. It would only be used for Time Machine. My disk is half full. The Mac Mini Pro is only 4 months old. Just thinking about the future. Had been using my 2T Lacie on it but just got a message saying I should have about a 8T disk. This after updating to Tahoe 26.3. I used the Lacie on my older 27” iMac for about 4 years. HDD would be fine. I know that SSDs are much more expensive.

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Probably want to stay away from the shingled drives

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I’m not familiar with that term “shingled drive” but searched it. Are there some drives that you would recommend even SSDs? Thanks!!!

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For what it’s worth, I’ve had bad luck with Seagate drives, including in LaCie enclosures.

Good luck finding an -affordable- hard drive these days.

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Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) uses overlapping data tracks to gain capacity, but they have atrocious write speed, and I’d question their use with APFS. Better is CMR.

I don’t have a lot of suggestions – I was just asking the questions that anyone needs to know to answer.

You’re going to have a hard time finding a really high capacity portable drive. If your disk is half full, then using the “get double for Time Machine” rule of thumb, perhaps 4 TB would be sufficient.

Massive Edit

You won’t find a 2.5" HDD that is 4 TB or higher in CMR. The problem is physics:

  • CMR 2.5" platters max out around 750 GB per platter
  • 2.5" drive holds at most 5 platters (for a 15mm height drive)

so the maximum you could get is 3.75TB. The largest CMR 2.5" drive ever shipped was a 3 TB drive.

So something’s got to give:

  • Performance
  • Cost
  • Capacity
  • Portable
    …pick 3 of 4

For example:

  • Give up Performance: get 2.5" 4 to 6 TB SMR drive
  • Give up Cost: get an SSD
  • Give up Capacity: get a 2 TB 2.5" CMR drive
  • Give up Portable: get a 4 to 8 TB 3.5" CMR drive

A 4 TB portable SSD will run about $400.

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Thank you very much, Michael!!!

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I’ve never had enclosures and will try not to in the future. I’ve haven’t had a problem with my 2T Lacie Ruggeds over the past 8 years.

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I use a desktop HDD for Time Machine backups and a portable HDD for Carbon Copy Cloner backups on my iMac. The Time Machine drive is always connected. The CCC drive is disconnected most of the time. I do a CCC backup about once a week or before installing an OS update.

I do this for redundancy and to increase the chances of having a clean version of my entire setup in the event of a catastrophic failure or a security breach.

I haven’t bought new backup drives for awhile but last time I followed the recommendations at Wirecutter. Both drives have been reliable during the time I’ve owned them.

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my post was a mistake; Amazon gave me 3.5" drives even though I was searching for 2.5". I updated the post.

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I’ve had two LaCie ruggeds fail before their expected time. The most recent one failed after about 3 1/2 years, so out of warranty, but MUCH shorter than most of the other external hard drives I’ve had.

My worst experience was with 1TB Seagate 3.5” drives where 4 failed in less than a year. YMMV, of course

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Thanks. I’ll look into Wirecutter. Have you heard of Glyph drives?

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My advice will be different.

I’ve never used time machine, ever. And never will.

I’d suggest a 4tb SSD (USB3.1 gen2 will do).
Then use CarbonCopyCloner for your backups (or possibly SuperDuper).

CCC (or SD) will not make the backup drive continuously “grow” in size.

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Thank you! Adam suggested using Carbon Copy Cloner daily in a NMUG class last year and also using Time Machine hourly and Backblaze continuously. I started Backblaze shortly after.

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No…but since I’ll probably be looking into buying new drives sometime in the next few months (waiting for announcements about the rumored Studio Display and Mac Studio upgrades before buying a new desktop setup) I will check Glyph out.

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Wow, SSD costs have gone up!

In November 2024 I bought a 4 TB OWC Express 1M2 USB4 drive for $549, plus tax. Today that same drive would cost $920.

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If a portable drive is a strict requirement, you’re pretty much limited to 5 or 6 TB hard drives at reasonable prices (<$200), though there are some 8 TB portable SSDs for over $700.

If you can afford it, get two 5 or 6 TB drives and set up independent Time Machine backups on each. That should mitigate the risk suggested by the perpetual “hard drive brand X is awful” or “technology X is clearly superior” debates. Another option is to set one drive up with Time Machine and the other drive with Carbon Copy Cloner, SuperDuper, or whatever your favorite backup tool may be.

Looking at Amazon today, WD My Passport drives look like good values. The first backup will take some time, but if you regularly connect the backup drive, subsequent backups shouldn’t take too long.

You might also consider getting a large capacity desktop drive, i.e., not a “portable” drive, which can provide a lot of storage at an economical price, and augment with periodic backups to a portable HD when you know you will go on the road.

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Just had a quick look at the Glyph website. I’m not an audio, photo, or video professional so their products, which seem to be enclosures and cables optimized for media creators, aren’t really targeted to me. I also didn’t see any listings or choices for the maker(s) of the HDD/SSD mechanisms they use, so if the manufacturer is a key decision point as it is for some people, the buying process might take more time than buying from, say, OWC or Amazon.

So maybe the forums at a place like DPReview would be a good place to get feedback on Glyph. The last time I bought a camera, DPReview was helpful. But note this was before it was acquired and then sold by Amazon.

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I second the recommendation to not worry much about the size of the Time Machine drive. What takes up the space is that, as an archive, it stores multiple versions of each file, with the oldest version determined by the drive’s capacity. However, I think the general experience is that most folks will have little need of the version created a year ago with 10 to 20 revisions since then.

For migration or recovery, only an image of your recent data is important.

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