Best backup solution for M1 MACs?

[pcmike]

Can anyone share some knowledge when it comes to what may be the best/most robust backup solution for M1 based MACs? Obviously Time Machine is available, but I would be interested in hearing what other alternatives people are using. Being able to make an image once I get the kids new computers setup and working prior to them doing their thing so that I can simply restore a complete working system fast and easily is my biggest goal. I have a synology NAS I’ll be using as the backup target. Looking forward to looking into any and all solutions you guys mention! Thank you

 

[AustinIllini]

I'm also interested in this. The mobile Macs are challenging but for the Mac mini time machine is just fine.

 

[Spindel]

I have a Synology NAS as target for Time Machine backups. And so far so god for me. I also like that the disc where I have the partition for my TM backup is a raid 1 array so I have redundancy.

 

[pcmike]

I have a Synology NAS as target for Time Machine backups. And so far so god for me. I also like that the disc where I have the partition for my TM backup is a raid 1 array so I have redundancy.

Ya, my entire synology is setup this way so the backup solution need not worry.

Time machine is useful, but it’s not exactly robust from what I gather. For example, you can’t just make a bootable disc image of a working system that can be used easily to just restore a system in minutes.... it’s way more of a convoluted process.

I remember reading about Carbon Clone Copier (?) years ago, but I’m wondering if there are other options out there.

 

[Spindel]

Ya, my entire synology is setup this way so the backup solution need not worry.

Time machine is useful, but it’s not exactly robust from what I gather. For example, you can’t just make a bootable disc image of a working system that can be used easily to just restore a system in minutes.... it’s way more of a convoluted process.

I remember reading about Carbon Clone Copier (?) years ago, but I’m wondering if there are other options out there.

I don't know, last time i needed to a full restore was 2013 when I got the mac I'm currently using but what I can remember it was fairly easy to set up using migration assistant.

Otherwise when you mess up some file (or accidentally erase something) it has always worked well. But as always YMMV.

EDIT:// After reading your post a bit better, yeah it when I did a full system restore last time it was not a process that only took a couple of minutes.

 

[handymanuk]

I have an M1 Mac mini on it's way and will be using a 6TB USB3.0 drive as a time machine. I also have an older MacBook Air. Does anyone know if I can share the 6TB drive on my home network and have my Air backup to that?

 

[GreenPixel]

I have an M1 Mac mini on it's way and will be using a 6TB USB3.0 drive as a time machine. I also have an older MacBook Air. Does anyone know if I can share the 6TB drive on my home network and have my Air backup to that?

You should be able to do that without issue.

 

[handymanuk]

Great news, thanks.

 

[Spindel]

OK for what it’s worth.

Got my M1 Mini yesterday and restored from my TM backup (encrypted) on my NAS. Took just under an hour, according to migration assistant the read speed was 45 MB/s.

Then set up a new TM backup and write speed for that was around 80 MB/s most of the time.

 

[radus]

just use carbon copy cloner and an external thunderbolt 3 ssd - to create bootable backups
it is a little bit more expensive but so much easier to use

 

[page3]

We don’t store anything locally, except caches etc.

All documents to server (redundancy) or cloud. Server backed up via Borg to external.

 

[leman]

Time machine has been significantly improved in Big Sur. It now uses APFS snapshots, so it's faster and much more reliable. If you want versioned backup, it's probably the best option around.

 

[pippox0]

just use carbon copy cloner and an external thunderbolt 3 ssd - to create bootable backups
it is a little bit more expensive but so much easier to use

From what I have read about Carbon Copy Cloner , it doesn’t do any bootable backup any more with macOS Big Sur because Apple changes system volume signing ...

So CCC makes a backup , but it’sn bootable ...
It is very frustrating because I have used CCC by almost 10 years ...

 

[Marty_Macfly]

Great thread guys, many thanks for sharing!


I get my 1st mac next month, and I’m trying to get my head around how to set the macbook up. This thread is great for the backing up side of things.


Best wishes

Martin

 

[Marty_Macfly]

Time machine has been significantly improved in Big Sur. It now uses APFS snapshots, so it's faster and much more reliable. If you want versioned backup, it's probably the best option around.

Hi Leman,



Gosh bit of a 0 to 100mph on all this tech! 😀

Does the Back up drive partition need to be reformatted to accommodate these APFS snapshots?

So far I’ve read about ExFAT, HFS+ ... and now APFS!



Regards
Martin

 

[Marty_Macfly]

From what I have read about Carbon Copy Cloner , it doesn’t do any bootable backup any more with macOS Big Sur because Apple changes system volume signing ...

So CCC makes a backup , but it’sn bootable ...
It is very frustrating because I have used CCC by almost 10 years ...

Hi Pip,


Thats rubbish... I was coming to conclusion of having to pay for an app to do this.... Now CCC is out?!


Am I missing something?

ITunes can do a complete backup for IPhones and IPads.

How come Apple doesn’t have an in-house app to do a complete backup of the Mac?


Regards
Martin

 

[pippox0]

Carbon Copy cloner 5.1.23​

✅ Bootable backups on macOS Big Sur
CCC can now make bootable backups of a Big Sur startup disk on Intel-based Macs. Support for System volume cloning on Apple Silicon Macs is disabled for now because Apple's APFS replication utility does not currently work on that platform. When Apple fixes that, we'll post an update to CCC that restores support for making bootable backups on Apple Silicon Macs.

So ATM We must wait for a fix ...

 

[Spindel]

Hi Leman,



Gosh bit of a 0 to 100mph all all this tech! 😀

Does the Back up drive partition need to be reformatted to accommodate these APFS snapshots?

So far I’ve read about ExFAT, HFS+ ... and now APFS!



Regards
Martin

I did nothing to my backup partition, it "just worked".

 

[IowaLynn]

Install a system on your backup drive. Or any other device.

 

[Yebubbleman]

Can anyone share some knowledge when it comes to what may be the best/most robust backup solution for M1 based MACs? Obviously Time Machine is available, but I would be interested in hearing what other alternatives people are using. Being able to make an image once I get the kids new computers setup and working prior to them doing their thing so that I can simply restore a complete working system fast and easily is my biggest goal. I have a synology NAS I’ll be using as the backup target. Looking forward to looking into any and all solutions you guys mention! Thank you

I would imagine that whatever solution you used with an Intel Mac will work fine under Rosetta 2.

 

[leman]

Does the Back up drive partition need to be reformatted to accommodate these APFS snapshots?

I would assume so. I haven't tried using an external disk yet as I do my backups to a Synology NAS, but I've read that external drives are even faster. I do see a major improvement in performance with my NAS backups.

To give you a bit more background information: until Big Sur Time Machine utilised hard links. Essentially, each version of the file was only stored on the disk once, but this file was simultaneously present in multiple folders. So a backup would be a bunch of folders with a timestamp in the name, and contents of those folders would point to these files. This works, but requires that each backup is "assembled" manually, as links need to be set for each file separately.

In Big Sur, Apple is using native snapshotting functionality of their new file system, APFS. They don't need to build the link structure per hand anymore. They simply copy over a "frozen" snapshot of the filesystem metadata. This is obviously faster and much more robust. I would also imagine that new backups require less space, but this is something to be verified.

 

[handymanuk]

You should be able to do that without issue.

This doesn't work unfortunately. On my Air I keep getting told that I don't have the right permissions to access the TM backup drive even though I can mount it on the desktop. I've ensured that all of the permissions (even for guests) are set to read and right on the drive in the Mac mini sharing properties. Any ideas? It's really frustrating.

 

[radus]

From what I have read about Carbon Copy Cloner , it doesn’t do any bootable backup any more with macOS Big Sur because Apple changes system volume signing ...

So CCC makes a backup , but it’sn bootable ...
It is very frustrating because I have used CCC by almost 10 years ...

the newest beta and its following release - do bootable backups on intel macs. For apple-silicone a new os x Installation on an external thunderbolt 3 ssd and ccc- user document - backups could help until ...

 

[phrehdd]

While not truly a backup, if one was to make a bootable external disk of the OS, couldn't they simply use the migration feature to collect up most of their present system? It is an odd way around but it would be bootable and include apps, files and such for the most part and be a temp workaround.

 

[matrix07]

Time machine has been significantly improved in Big Sur. It now uses APFS snapshots, so it's faster and much more reliable. If you want versioned backup, it's probably the best option around.

I believe if there's a problem happen I can restore the machine, use Migration Assistance and will have what I had down to every settings in about an hour or so?