I’ve been using WD spinners for years, and no issues with CCC. I had too may problems with TM. For me, Bombich writes and maintains software. Apple makes phones and streams media.
A client is hell-bent on bu’s. He has way less data than I to back up. I got him onto Samsmug T9 SSDs. They have been very consistent. He must have 30TB in various drives. His “local” CCC drive I set him up with 8TB WD HDDs.
I also have a few WD blue 5400 HDDs for my server. They are SMRs. No issues.
An external Glyph w/Seagate guts for project media, for Pro Tools.
1 external 320G WD that I extracted years ago from my G5. It is my local “manual” bu, not CCC’d.
In my brothers Jetsons iMac, he has a 20yo 120G WD Caviar that I extracted from my audio playback rig a decade ago. It works every day. Not that things are built today as well as then ….necessarily.
I ended up with an SMR drive (did not know what it was at the time) that I was using as a boot drive for, I think, Mountain Lion on my Mac Pro. The initial clone took about 50% longer than expected – and was noticeable. But after that it was fine as a boot drive and I never noticed any issues.
Nonetheless, given a choice I would opt for CMR over SMR.
I can recommend the Crucial X9 4TB SSD. I back up to one using SuperDuper! so I have a bootable copy to hand. It would be slow but at least you can easily find and get stuff. I never use Time Machine. Mainly because it has let me down before. I believe in keeping things simple and not relying on “library” structures for anything if I can manage it in the Finder. Try recovering a specific file from a corrupted Time Machine backup. The 4TB copy will be a duplicate of your new Mac and no bigger than it needs to be. If your Mac dies, you can move the SSD to another Mac (of similar vintage) boot into your back up and carry on working (slowly). If some of the stuff you have on your new Mac is irreplaceable, I would consider having a third and maybe fourth place to back up to for complete comfort. I am not beyond using DVDRs for specific things which are important but current projects documents I put in a dedicated folder to sync to my iCloud account. The price of these drives has shot up over the last year or so, so a Crucial X6 4TB might be more affordable.
Eh. A lot depends on the specific drives you’re looking at, but in principle I’d say the opposite.
Like I said, unless you’re dealing with very large files regularly, incremental backups are going to be relatively small. The more important factor is not performance - how fast the backups run - but capacity, which controls how much of an incremental backup history you’ll be able to keep. And that’s the exact tradeoff SMR makes - lower performance for higher capacity. For most people, that’s the tradeoff you’re going to want in a backup system.
Pre-Monterey and using HFS+ formatted backup disks, Time Machine was indeed a disaster waiting to happen. It was prone to backup disk corruption because of “hacks” Apple had to put into HFS to support it. As well as the known brittleness of HFS+ (having Disk Warrior around was almost a necessity with HFS+ disks).
I’ve found that when using an APFS formatted HDD or SSD backup disk (with Monterey and later), Time Machine has been much more reliable. The Finder now allows you to easily access those backups (mounting APFS snapshots of the backup disk for you) so you don’t have to “Enter Time Machine”.
I’m not saying that Time Machine is the only backup utility you should use - your needs will dictate that. But today it’s not the devil that it was in the past, and is a valuable tool to have in the kit for a lot of people. .
I went with the 8TB Glyph Blackbox PRO Desktop Drive from Glyph Production Technologies. Just received it a few days ago and started TM backup manually as I have done since I started using TM about 5-6 years ago. I have a Backblaze account also ever since Adam mentioned it in a NMUG meeting or class. I put my TM drive away after running it, away from my Mac. I wanted something kind of rugged and not too complicated. I don’t like having to use a power adapter/cord … but oh well. ……