I use Arq for this, now pointing to cloud storage provided by Dropbox which I was a customer of anyway.
It might be worth a separate thread, but over the last couple years, more files under (mostly?) ~/Library have given errors during backups, forcing me to exclude them from the backup sets in order to get a successful backup. The developer thinks Apple is causing this restriction, so I’d love to know if it’s also affecting competing products like Chronosync.
In any case, Arq has generally worked well for me, including a few isolated times when I had to restore older versions of files.
Worth noting the Dropbox has their own backup “product” you can enable, which I believe includes versioning, and one wonders if my life would be simpler just going that route since I’m already paying for the highest non-business tier of Dropbox.
Arq can also backup to Dropbox (or OneDrive and maybe box.com) but I recall the developer saying that backup performance was very slow compared with S3-style online backup services. My guess is that Dropbox’s own service would have the same issue. [edit: I was wrong.] I used to do this just as another redundancy (since I had the space unused anyway) but then I dropped my Dropbox plan.
I use CCC for this but not using a nounted volume as it doesn’t always mount if the source is sleeping. Use the Remove Macintosh as destination and set safety net on…just setup a share on some other machine and use that share as the destination in Remote Macintosh. It’s been pretty bulletproof for going on 2 years now. I gave up on Time Machine to network volumes due to unreliability of operation and because it uses a disk image instead of a Finder readable folder.
I have used Arq with Amazon and Wasabi as cloud storage, and now my Arq points to Dropbox. I have raised a number of performance issues with the developer over the years, but I don’t think Dropbox being slower than the other clouds has been something I’ve observed.
But that remote Mac has to be on the same LAN, no? Or else you have to enable some type of DNS and port forwarding? Otherwise, it’s not a cloud backup equivalent like Arq/Dropbox, the kind that can protect you from your house burning down.
Yes, it’s a backup on my local LAN of our laptops home directories. All of the real data is either in iCloud, DropBox, or the Studio that is the home file/print/scanner/backup server and it in turn gets backed up to a couple of its local drives and BackBlaze.
One could just backup to DropBox and it will sync to the cloud as well…but we keep little to no data solely on the daily driver laptops…and also have a couple of Samsung T7s that get weekly clones of the data volume on the laptop.
Does Arq backup directly to the DropBox cloud or does it backup to Dropbox on the local computer and then get synced to the cloud?
I recall wondering this too, and I forget how my research ended. But my bet is the former, since:
Arq asks for the credentials to Dropbox (in a web browser), and
Apple’s new File Provider API, while not fully adopted by Dropbox yet, stores your “local” files buried in ~/Library. Not sure what that interface is like for developers.
It uses the DropBox API to back up directly to Dropbox, and, in fact, DropBox recommends that you make sure that the folder used is not synced back to the computer.
Right, so in the end, what’s the point of these duplication tools, realistically? You’re limited to Migration Assistant for restoration, so isn’t Time Machine all you need?
It seems to me that we’ve lost more than just bootable duplicates here, but an entire category of software. Or are people really choosing to maintain bootable backups by installing and reinstalling software updates onto the data-only clones, manually? How about the network backups of the stored data—are they actually reliable enough to compensate for Time Machine’s own network backup unreliabilities caused by sparse image bundles? It all just seems like a lot of highly improbable corner cases that mostly have no future.
Meanwhile, Apple has iCloud to sell you, and you can use tools like Arq to back up to many other cloud providers. Both my desktop and NAS Macs are covered by Time Machine, and the NAS uses Arq to back up to Wasabi; iCloud Drive is for the very small stuff, and even then, iOS has SMB support now sufficient to make even that less necessary. It’s a shame, but the whole idea of the “clone” basically seems to be … dead?
All software fails from time to time. So it’s generally good practice to make multiple backups with two or more different tools. So if one should glitch in a way that corrupts the backup, there’s a high likelihood that the other will be usable.
Note that Migration Assistant doesn’t have to restore from Time Machine. It can also migrate from a clone made with other tools (not sure if you can pick a specific snapshot if you do this, but it definitely works with the active file system for the volume).
And you’re not limited to Migration Assistant. That just makes the process simpler. If you are restoring with the same version of macOS as used by the backup, you should be able to perform a clean installation and then use any tool you like to restore the Data volume. Just don’t delete that Data volume before restoring over it, because the restore might not correctly create the firmlinks to the System volume.
You can also manually reinstall your apps, create users and then drag/drop your documents from the backup. But that’s more time consuming than using MA.
Those of you who are familiar with Howard Oakley’s essays, will remember that he likes to point out Apple silicon Macs in fact allow for more/better/proper downgrading compared to Intel, not less.
The point is you can downgrade any Apple silicon Mac to any macOS that is not older than the Mac itself. Thanks to DFU mode and IPSW the process ensures that both the OS and the firmware are downgraded together and thus remain in sync. This in stark contrast to Intel Macs that do not expose a user path to downgrading firmware (neither EFI nor iBridge). Folks downgrading Intel macOS then end up in an odd situation where their firmware is newer than the installed OS. There is no way to get the two synced up again without again updating macOS to the latest and greatest.
Note also that Apple provides this downgrade ability explicitly for Macs. iOS devices provide no such downgrade path despite their reliance on the same DFU and IPSW ideas.
… which is a deliberate business decision. You can replace EFI/iBridge firmware using Configurator, but Apple stops signing old firmware images after a week, causing old images to fail validation and therefore become uninstallable.
The old firmware images are available for download, but without a way to install them, there’s little point.
Not on Mac. As I wrote, this is a deliberate choice Apple makes to enable downgrading on Apple Silicon Macs. Unlike iOS, where they stop signing after a (usually brief) grace period.
This is an excellent repository for such IPSW files.
As a MacBook user where keeping an external drive connected all of the time is a pain in the neck, I use them as a “just-in-case” repository that contains data that’s likely about one week old, but should get me up and running quickly.
As for Time Machine - again, keeping an external drive connected is a pain, so I don’t use it.
What I use instead of Time Machine are hourly backups of data from Arq to an external drive connected to a Mac mini on my LAN (reachable if I happen to be away from home using Tailscale, though I’m almost always home), plus I also backup hourly using Arq to two different online severs - one for my day-to-day data using B2, one for media files to AWS’s glacier service.
For me if I have to restore data when setting up a new computer, I use Arq to restore from that Mac mini external drive locally. But almost all of my critically-important files are actually synced (using iCloud Drive, OneDrive for Office files, and Syncthing for files I don’t want on online service) so actually there isn’t a lot to restore, or capture from Migration Assistant. I almost always rebuild from scratch (I have a checklist of steps to take to get my apps and settings just right if I have to reinstall from scratch, which I maintain at least quarterly.)
So, yes, I have moved on from bootable backups. The clone is a useful part of disaster recovery, though. Not to boot, but as a source for my files.
Not really. In a nutshell, the older-version IPSW provides the older version “firmware” which includes Recovery. And it is that older-version Recovery that then allows installing the older macOS version. The latter arrives via a separate installer package that can be downloaded from Apple (various methods) or, in cases of very old Mac OS X versions, also from the Mr. Macintosh website. All those details can be found here: