I have two Large (think TB) file folders on my new mac. They contain only my collections of MP4 files. I have time machine running but want to manually make my own versioned backups to my own hard drives. One set is stored in a Fireproof safe. I can’t make easy sense out of CCC 7x. These do not need to be bootable. Automation is not necessary. Just copies of the file folders and MP4s inside the source folders.
Please make Backup soft ware suggestions.
(BTW I also hope to get Backblaze working again soon.)
I’m still using version 6, but you should be able to create a backup task where the source is this set of folders and the destination is an APFS volume on external storage.
Turn on the “SafetyNet” feature. This will tell CCC to create a new snapshot on the destination for each backup. Files that didn’t change since the last backup won’t waste space. You can configure the destination’s snapshot retention policy to determine how many snapshots you want to retain and what the rules should be with respect to when old snapshots should be deleted.
I assume version 7 still has this capability, although the specific names and menus might have changed a bit.
You can back up to an HFS+ volume. If you do, then the “Safety Net” feature works a bit differently. It creates a directory tree in the root of the volume where old versions of files are moved, with the latest versions being in the location corresponding to the location on the original volume.
The downside of HFS+ is that you can’t use snapshots, which are a much more convenient way to version-control your backups.
It’s a mechanism where you can quickly make an instant “snapshot” of an entire volume’s file system, containing its entire contents. The snapshot is read-only and will never change, regardless of any subsequent changes to the volume’s files. You can make as many snapshots as you like (up to an internal limit, I assume) to preserve the state of the file system at various points in time.
Snapshots are very efficient because the data blocks used by the snapshot’s files are shared with the original files. When files are modified, the blocks are duplicated (“copy on write” semantics), but not until then. So as you make more and more snapshots, content that doesn’t change doesn’t get duplicated.
Of course, it also means that when a file is deleted, the disk blocks storing its data won’t get freed if any snapshots are also referencing those blocks. But you can delete snapshots (and your backup software may automatically do it as a part of a retention policy), and when the last snapshot referencing a block is deleted, then the block will be freed.
The concept is not new to Apple. Commercial file servers (e.g. Network Appliance) have had this tech for a long time. Apple introduced the feature as a part of APFS. It is probably one of the most useful features introduced by APFS.