I’ve never used TM either. I use ChronoSync
I’ve had good luck with the Western Digital My Passport series.
I love Lacie but every since one I bought died :(
1 Like
Thanks for this!!!
Thank you. Alan. I’ve only used Time Machine (for about the past 8 years or so) and more recently Backblaze also. What is “an image of your recent data”? And, what software do you use to do that kind of backup?
a reply to another thread that I started asking about Glyph:
“They’ve been around for a long time. High-end, high quality drives marketed at professional content creators. Think movie and music studios.
They will serve you very well, but may easily be beyond your budget.”
a reply to another thread that I started asking about Glyph:
“They’ve been around for a long time. High-end, high quality drives marketed at professional content creators. Think movie and music studios.
They will serve you very well, but may easily be beyond your budget.”
Shingled Magnetic Recording, aka “SMR”. It’s a technique for increasing drive capacity, but at a high performance cost. They might be OK for use-cases where you don’t do a lot of writing, or are primarily reading data, but they are going to be painful in a scenario that involves writing a lot of data (e.g., backups or content creation).
The counterpart is usually referred to as “CMR” (Conventional Magnetic Recording), and it generally refers to any technology other than SMR.
I personally think HDDs are just fine for backups, but if you use one for Time Machine, keep the following in mind:
- It will be making a backup every hour. So make sure you get a drive rated for 24x7 operation. Consumer drives often aren’t, and I wouldn’t recommend them for this kind of application.
- I recommend 7200 RPM drives. These will perform a lot better than lower-speed drives and shouldn’t cost much more.
- Don’t use a bus-powered drive. You’ll get more reliable operation if the drive has its own power supply.
- HDD’s, especially large/fast ones, can get hot. I recommend using an enclosure with a fan, to keep it cool. Or failing that, make sure you place it in a location that gets lots of airflow.
I have found that drives marketed and sold as external storage typically are not the best. They are often bus-powered, and usually run slowly and are not rated for 24x7 operation.
I always recommend buying a high quality internal 3.5" HDD and mount it in a (separately-purchased) high quality USB enclosure. There are a lot of options here, but these days, I’m using:
- Toshiba N300 or N300 Pro. These are designed for NAS enclosures, but they work just fine for single-drive installations. They are 7200 RPM CMR drives rated for 24x7 operation. The Pro versions are rated for longer life but are otherwise comparable to the non-Pro versions.
- A generic USB 3 enclosure that has a cooling fan. The last one I got was a FIDECO enclosure. This has a fan, supports UASP, and is fairly quiet.
I buy my drives from MicroCenter, because they have a physical store near me. According to their web site, they sell N300 drives for $153 (4 TB) to $405 (20 TB). They sell N300 Pro drives for $159 (4 TB) to $460 (22 TB).
The enclosure I linked to (above) costs $30.
So altogether, this means a good quality 4TB drive for under $200, up to a 22 TB drive for about $500.
Whether or not you consider that “affordable” is a matter of opinion.
I personally don’t think a “portable” drive is appropriate for Time Machine backups. They’re designed to be small and easily transportable, but not for continuous operation.
Of course, if you are using it with a laptop, then the inconvenience of a 3.5" drive with an external power supply may be a deal-breaker.
You can buy high capacity 2.5" drives and mate them with portable enclosures. I haven’t done this myself, but some things to keep in mind:
-
The thin ones (7 and 9.5 mm) meant for laptops have limited capacity. Finding one larger than 2TB may not be possible.
Higher capacities exist (e.g., Seagate makes 2.5" Barracuda drives up to 5TB), but they have thicker cases (typically 15 mm). These are meant for servers and won’t fit in most laptops. You’ll have to make sure any USB enclosure will be big enough.
For the curious, you can get servers with 2.5" drive bays. These are designed so you can cram a lot of drives into a very small enclosure. For example, Dell’s PowerEdge R360 can be configured to have 8 2.5" hot-swappable drive bays in a 1U rack-mount enclosure. Each bay can be ordered with an HDD up to 2.4 TB or an SSD up to 7.68 TB. And Dell’s prices for these enterprise drives are insanely expensive compared to what you and I would pay for consumer drives.
Surprisingly, some manufacturers only sell their largest 2.5" drives in bespoke enclosures. For instance, WD’s internal 2.5" drives only go up to 2 TB. But they make drives up to 6 TB, as a part of their My Passport external drive products. Which is annoying if you want to use your own enclosure, since that drive might not work with generic enclosures (often the case with portable drives) and even if it does, I don’t like generating the e-waste from it.
-
2.5" drives are generally 5400 RPM or slower. I know you used to be able to get faster ones. My old Mac Mini Server came with two 7200 RPM 750 GB 2.5" hard drives. But that was a long time ago.
That doesn’t surprise me. It’s been hard to find specs on high capacity 2.5" drives, but unless I find a data sheet that says otherwise, I’ll agree with you. (Seagate’s 2.5" Barracuda drives are all SMR.)
Yes. As I wrote in the other thread, they are high-end external drives marketed to professional content creators (music and movie studios). Great products, but fairly expensive compared to consumer equipment.
IMO, TM is one tool in your bag. It shouldn’t be your only one. Hourly incremental backups are great in addition to periodic clones.
BTW, CCC (don’t know about SD!) can also grow to fill the destination. It has an option, which I strongly recommend, where it uses APFS snapshots to store multiple historic backups in addition to the last one you made.
These will grow just like TM does. And, like TM, it should auto-delete the oldest snapshots as necessary to make room for new backups when the destination fills up.
Yeah. Thanks to AI becoming so popular, cloud providers and the data centers they use are buying massive amounts of RAM and storage, driving up the prices on the largest capacity devices.
But it’s useful for more than just that.
Last year, I discovered corruption in one of my FileMaker databases. It turns out that I had to go back nearly 8 months to find a backup that didn’t have the corruption. Without Time Machine, my recovery would have been much more painful than it was having that backup.
5 Likes
I forgot to mention, that I’ve only been manually backing up on Time Machine once a week. And, then I put the drive away somewhere safe.
Have a look at:
I’ve been happily using the Samsung 1TB T7 and its T5 predecessor since 2017.
I use two sets of two (one Time Machine, one Carbon Copy Cloner).
Both drives are attached throughout the day; Time machine runs automatically, CCC is set to automatically run once a day. Computer is turned off overnight and SSDs unplugged.
Sets are swapped weekly (and stored separately).
2 Likes
SSDs are great, and will speed up your backups quite a bit. But you pay for that performance. A hard disk drive will cost a lot less than an SSD of comparable size.
Personally, I don’t think it’s worth the cost for backups. At least for me, Time Machine runs in the background and completes fast enough that my HDD (as mentioned above, a Toshiba N300 in a USB 3 enclosure) has no problem keeping up. I spent under $200 to combine a 4 TB drive and enclosure.
In comparison…
These are nice drives, and they’re much faster than hard drives. I’d definitely consider one of these for on-line storage. But I don’t think the speed is worth the cost when used for backups.
Those 4TB drives cost between $300 (for the cheapest models) and over $1000 for the most expensive models. The Samsung models cited cost between $610 (T7) and $800 (T9).
Ultimately, you have to decide if the performance is worth the price for your application.
All this having been said, you can also build your own external SSD, much like a hard drive. You can buy an NVMe stick (they currently exist at sizes up to 8 TB) and mate it with a separately-purchased enclosure.
I’ve done this a few times (mostly for holding VM images, not for backups), and it’s a good way to save money, as long as you don’t buy el-cheapo parts.
Using Micro Center as a pricing reference (again, because I shop there), prices for an internal M.2 NVMe stick (ignoring those with bundled heat-sinks) are currently:
- 1TB: $150 (KLEVV - a no-name brand) through $330 (WD Black SN8100)
- 2 TB: $260 (KeySpec - a no-name brand) through $650 (WD Black SN8100)
- 4 TB: $400 (Crucial P310) through $1,290 (WD Black SN8100)
- 8 TB: $900 (Inland Performance+ - MicroCenter’s house brand) through $2,240 (WD Black SN850X)
Sadly, these are much higher than they were a year ago - flash chips are in very high demand right now. I paid $135 for a 2TB stick from Inland back in October.
I installed my SSD into a basic Orico USB 3 enclosure, which costs $15 from Amazon.
Others here have recommended using Thunderbolt enclosures for better performance. They are available for $25-100, depending on brand and model. I won’t recommend any, because I haven’t personally used any of them, but others here have and have shared recommendations in the past.
So…
If you want to build an SSD today, using the pricing I cited above, and using a least-expensive NVMe stick from a known brand, it will cost about:
- 1 TB: $175 for USB 3 or $185-260 for Thunderbolt
- 2 TB: $305 for USB 3 or $315-390 for Thunderbolt
- 4 TB: $415 for USB 3 or $425-500 for Thunderbolt
- 8 TB: $915 for USB 3 or $925-1000 for Thunderbolt
These prices are comparable to commercial external SSDs (more expensive than the no-name brands, less expensive than major brands), but with the advantage that you can research the parts and know exactly the specs of what you’re getting.
5 Likes
What I meant was either a clone of the data volume produced by backup utilities like Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper, or the virtual image of the drive found using Time Machine. The easiest way to migrate to a new machine or recover a crashed drive is to install a valid version of macOS on the hardware and then use the Apple Migration utility to migrate from one of the images above.
1 Like
Thank you very much, David!!!
Thank you very much, Alan!!
SSD prices have gone up a lot, but the big win of them for Time Machine backup is that they’re silent. I really don’t like listening to fans or drives on my desk. I recommended this 2 TB Crucial SSD for my aunt recently; it’s not insanely priced (though it was $109 before the recent price hikes), but it may not be large enough if you have a lot of data on your 4 TB internal drive.
2 Likes
@ace while I’ve been happy with Crucial products in the past, today I’d steer clear of any new purchase of Crucial components. Micron is shutting that business down, which raises real questions about the future suppprt of Crucial products.
2 Likes
David wrote:
”BTW, CCC (don’t know about SD!) can also grow to fill the destination. It has an option, which I strongly recommend, where it uses APFS snapshots to store multiple historic backups in addition to the last one you made.”
First thing I did was to TURN OFF the “snapshot” feature in CCC.
No snapshots on my internal SSD (other than the one Apple forces on us from which to boot). My CCC backups stay the same size as my data drives, from one month to the next.
Perhaps somebody, somewhere, needs to backup “every hour” (using tm?).
Not much changes on my main drives with such frequency or urgency.
I back up once, maybe twice a week (both to drives stored near the Mac, and other drives “stored away”).
The internal drive on my m4 Mini is partitioned thusly
Boot – APFS (no choice), has apps and mail, but next-to-NO personal data on it.
Main – HFS+, has personal data and other files
Media – HFS+, photos, some videos, etc.
Music – HFS+, music, of course.
Just for the heck of it while writing this reply, I ran a backup of my “Main” partition to my “close by” backup SSD, with CarbonCopyCloner.
CCC reports:
Time elapsed: 0s (it was completed in less than 1 second)
Files copied: 75 (14.6mb)
A backup on the boot volume is usually done in under a minute.
It takes longer to connect/disconnect the backup drive than it does to run the backups.
1 Like
The snapshots which TM puts on the internal drive are by far the fastest and easiest way of rolling back a Mac. They can’t roll back across an OS update but if things go pear shaped for any reason they are ideal fro a quick roll back to before the event. Much faster than an erase and migrate from backup. I have used them several times.
2 Likes
As mentioned in another discussion, TimeMachineEditor allows you to set your own TM backup frequency. I have mine set for every 4 hours. This is less demanding on the TM backup drive than the default hourly backup.
I have a 2TB SSD permanently attached for these regular backups but also another SSD for offsite backups (i.e. my car) as well as a Synology NAS that I boot up on a weekly basis (the NAS replaced my Apple Time Capsule that worked so well as a networked backup device for many years).
2 Likes
In general and especially with hard drives, I’d agree with that. But since SSDs tend to fail early if they’re going to fail at all, it’s hard to imagine what sort of support you’d need in a distant future when it seems likely that capacities may have increased, price per gigabyte may have dropped again, and local storage strategies may have changed.
1 Like
I was about to recommend a Crucial portable SSD only to discover the service is being shut down. I have used their portable and external drives for years without any problem and agree with Adam that they fail fast or not at all. Buy two and backup the same data to both.
1 Like
I actually think that’s not an issue for most people. Unless you’re working with very large files very often (photos, video, audio), the amount of data written on a typical incremental backup will be very small; my TM hourly backups are typically a few hundred MB at most, and that’s going to be just a minute or two no matter how slow the drive writes are. The only really critical speed penalty will be on the initial backup, and that can be left to run overnight.
I’ve been using portable bus-powered drives for close to 20 years; at the office, I had four different ones plugged into my laptop through a hub, with TM cycling between them on an hourly basis. This evened out wear and provided redundancy, and I could easily unplug one and take it with me for travel. Counting ones I had to drop because I outgrew them, I probably had at least 20-25 drives over that period; two Toshibas (both failed), two Seagates (one failed), three Hitachi (1 failed) and the rest WD (two failed). That’s enough to get at least something of a statistical sample, I think. The failure rate is slightly higher than what I’ve experienced with 3.5” internals on my NAS devices and my old MacPro over the same period, although the sample set for the 3.5” is much smaller.
2 Likes