A post was merged into an existing topic: Problem with Time Machine drive spinning down
CarbonCopy for me too. Trying to get a client off TM as well.
I love CCC for cloning, especially the recovery partition and apfs snapshot handling, but itās not all that flexible for versioned backups compared to Chronosync. CS has many ways of selecting what gets backed up, how many old versions are kept for how long, etc.
But neither can do what time machine can do: hard linked directories, which can be a big space saver on the backup drive, letting you keep more past history. TM also makes it fairly easy to restore from a past date, and some things from within apps. (Assuming that the TM backup doesnāt eat itself, which is why you also need a second kind of backup.)
I use:
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Time Machine for versioned backups
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Chronosync for a daily clone to drives that rotate off site every few months; some are versioned
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CCC for one off clones, archival clones, and insurance clones before restoring a computer (redundancy in software is as important as redundancy in hardware)
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CCC to create backups to encrypted disk images that I uploaded to sync.com at a friendās house (usefully fast connection). Then CS lets me make old style incremental backups from there, ala everything that changed after a certain date. For the online out of region backup, I donāt care that it will be a mess to restoreāthat restoration scenario is a regional disaster such as a major earthquake, and Iām not going be bothering about computers for months.
Not needing versioned backups I donāt use TM, but I canāt speak too highly of ChronoSync, used with rotating externals.
Iād gone with Synch Pro for years after that bad period with Retrospect ā played with CCC but it lacked features I needed. Didnāt keep much of an eye on other backup software.
Then Synch Pro was āretiredā with other 32Bit applications, and Adam recommended ChronoSync. A great, extensive, solid program; with one nice adjunct no oneās mentioned yet: upgrades free for ever!
Iām sold!
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Honestly, in the MANY years Iāve been using TM, once I did a full restore and maybe 3 or 4 times per year I need an āolderā version of some file or folder. CCC I have set up in 100% automated fashion, it boots my computer in the middle of the night, does itās thing then shuts down. 2 years now, 100% utterly reliable (well, it did fail once but did it when I booted the machine, I wrote them and Mike himself replied with a suggestion that fixed the issueā¦ SMC was the failure point).
Yes I use their SafetyNet. The only possible issue is one relating to storage space. My main boot is a 1T drive close to 700G used. My ācloneā drive then had under 300G for SafetyNet. Practically, it shows using 200G with 100G free. Looks like the oldest set of files is 9/2. Point being it can only āgo backā so far. HOWEVER, my bet is if I replace the 1T ācloneā with a 2T one, SafetyNet may hold files going back MANY more months.
Now as it is, I DO use a 2T drive for TMā¦ looks like it can go back to Oct. 2019, so about 11 months worth (itās already deleting older backups due to space, so that is most likely a rough rolling number). It COULD be that with another 1T of disk space on my āclone,ā it may hold as much āolderā files as TM does.
So, when I can out a few bucks together, looks like a 2T drove for my ācloneā may be in order. THEN I can say I have everything TM has doubled! AND 100% TOTALLY unlike TM which essentially has zero support, Mike Bombich is always there, always quick to respond, always MOST helpful.
Havenāt tried CSā¦but CCC versions just fine. Takes more destination space of course but any versioning does. It doesnāt prune the versions unless it runs out of spaceā¦ it thatās easy with either a volume size limit or go in every couple months and clear some of the old ones out. Iāve found that I very rarely need to recover something more than a couple of weeks old. I might grab CS and see how itās versioning worksā¦but probably isnāt worth buying another solution unless thereās something I decide I really need.
For those āupgradingā to Catalina from Mojave, do remember that the first TimeMachine backup in Catalina will render all previous (Mojave) TM backups worthless for recovery should you change your mind and decide to go back to Mojave. The proper method is to retire your TM backup disk prior to the Catalina upgrade and then start using a new backup drive; keep Catalina from even seeing your Mojave TM disk.
I think this is also especially true for Big Sir. IIRC, Time Machine format has changed entirely, and I believe it is recommended to start a fresh Time Machine backup.
As to āTime Machine has become such a bummerā and āTime Machine format has changed entirely [in Big Sur]ā, see this Eclectic Light article.
āJudging by widespread comments about the Big Sur betas, one major new feature being tested in them is a version of Time Machine which can at last make backups which are stored on an APFS volume. Up to and including Catalina, Time Machine has only supported two backup destinations: local storage in HFS+ format, and networked storage via AFP or SMB. As it is nearly three years since Apple released its new file system in macOS High Sierra, for many users APFS support is high on the wishlist for Big Sur.ā
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āWhen Apple released the first version of APFS on Mac OS X, in High Sierra, its new snapshot feature was incorporated into Time Machine. They were initially used instead of the FSEvents database to determine what should be backed up.ā
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āFor Big Surās Time Machine to be able to back up to APFS destinations, those backups need a new structure which isnāt reliant on directory hard links, but would have the same effect in terms of creating the Finder illusion, and minimising space required to store what appears to be a complete copy of the volume being backed up.
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Determining what gets backed up in Catalina can thus depend on snapshots, and snapshots are made during each backup, but because the backup destination remains in HFS+ format it canāt use snapshots itself, and instead still has to rely on directory hard links.
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Several beta testers have reported that Big Surās backups maintain their Finder illusion as they are snapshots, which are mounted on demand when the user selects them in the Finder. Although a plausible explanation, thereās clearly a little more to it. Other reports confirm another feature high on the wishlist for Time Machine, that it can back up changed blocks from large files, rather than always having to copy the whole file whenever anything changes within it. These are interrelated: if backups are going to rely on snapshots, then itās essential to use those file system metadata to minimise the amount of duplicated storage space by backing up blocks whenever possible. However, HFS+ had no support for doing that.ā
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āIn Big Sur, copying items to the backup is more complex than in Catalina. Not only are blocks copied (āFiles Delta Copiedā in the log), but unchanged directories are also āmove skippedā before the snapshot is made of the backup. The āmove skippedā directory appears to be a synthetic form of directory hard link which propagates unchanged directories into the backup. To understand how Big Sur can show a backup using a snapshot, we need to understand how it handles those two tasks, at the least.ā
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According to this āNext up: Arq 7!ā article by its principal developer, you may want to wait until that versionās released before switching to Arq:
āArq 6 has a cross-platform user interface made with Electron (like Slack and many other apps). Arq 6 works great for new users, but unfortunately there were unexpected issues with importing Arq 5 data, and feedback on the UI was largely (and sometimes very passionately) negative.ā
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" At some point we tried prototyping Arq 6 as a ānativeā UI on macOS, and realized we like it a lot better.
So, we decided to implement the entire UI as a ānativeā UI. Itās got better keyboard navigation, itās more intuitive, has a smaller disk footprint, and supports drag-and-drop to easily restore files to your desktop or a Finder window. It just feels better. We hope you like it too. Weāre working on implementing the Windows UI as a ānativeā UI as well."
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" Because it looks and feels so different and to avoid confusion weāre calling it Arq 7 ."
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" Arq 7 Features and Improvements"
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"More features:
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Configure a single backup plan to include items from SMB network shares, AFP network shares, attached disk, or all of the above"
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"Plus all the Arq 6 features: -
Perfect backups: Arq can use APFS āsnapshotsā (on macOS) and VSS (on Windows) to get a frozen-in-time view of the filesystem and create a backup from it, even as the files are changing on disk. Great for backing up virtual machines, for example."
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" Arq 7 Release Timeline
Arq 7 for macOS is in pre-release right now. If youād like to get access to it right away, please email support@arqbackup.com and weāll send you a link."
Iām looking for a Time Machine replacement. (Time Machine just canāt seem to trim, so the disks fills up after a few weeks and things stop.) Itās now been more than four years since anyoneās commented here. Is Chronosync Express still a good option? Or Carbon Copy Cloner?
Strange - my Time Machine backups (I use an external HD and two SSDs) seem to be working fine. Those that are nearly full seem OK with Time Machine (intentionally) discarding the oldest files.
Maybe your TM disk needs some first aid (Disk Utility)?
I also use Chronosync for data backup to a spare Mac but would not rely on it for my main backup.
I use Arq backup to network-attached drives (though it could work with locally attached drives) to replace Time Machine on all of my Macs. It can back up hourly, can thin based on your own criteria as well.
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Important to remember: TM doesnāt back up email. Apple assumes email is IMAP on your server. Your IMAP server will prune your email according to its rules.
If you want to back up email, you need a non-TM solution. Or use Mail Archiver X to create an archive email database and back that up (as a set of files) using TM or some other backup software.
Iām not sure thatās correct.
I have old emails from long ago as āOn my Macā as well as an old POP3 account that canāt go IMAP that has a lot of emails long removed from the POP server. But I havenāt lost any of those emails over the years in spite of multiple applications of Migration Assistant to a new Mac where a TM backup was used as the source. If all those emails made it all the way to this latest Mac, then they must have been backed up on that TM disk that I last used for migration, I would think.
Perhaps thatās true only for IMAP since there the assumption could be that the server holds the ground truth or master dataset and thus a client can always sync back up to that if necessary.
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Yes, if you move emails onto a local folder, you can back them up as you please. Typically reading a POP email moves it as you have defined, to āOn my Macā or some other folder.
You can also Export emails to somewhere outside the mail file structure, e.g., an external disk, to back them up.
TM doesnāt do anything about fetching and storing IMAP email.
So you have it right that it is a more nuanced concern.
That is not correct for my Macs using various IMAP services. TM backs up ~/Library/Mail in full.
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I use Carbon Copy Cloner to copy my Mail folders to another location. Rather than for backup, I do that to enable Spotlight searching in Finder and HoudahSpot.