Best practices for backup Mac mini M2 with Ventura?

[roadkill401]

I upgrade to a new Mac mini M2 Pro in June to do music production as a hobby in my retirement. I had an old iMac 5K 2014 but decided it was just too old so I retired that. From my old iMac, I have kept some or actually a lot of the thunderbolt and other devices that were plugged into it. I bought an apple TB2 to TB3 adaptor that seems to work on the most part. But found some troubles.

I have a Lacie TB2 2tb hard disk that I used for backup. its great for storage but when I try and use it with the new M2 Mini, it constantly keeps popping up an error that the drive was not ejected correctly when the Mac goes to sleep. According to Apple support this is my problem as they don't support external devices and they say it's just because the drive is too old. I don't get this problem if I plug the drive back into the iMac. So I am pretty sure it isn't a hardware problem with the drive.

So I went out and bought a USB3.2 external NVME case and a 1TB matching M.2 card. it's fast and great for backup but gets the exact same issue when the Mac goes to sleep. Apple support says that this is because it's a windows drive and not a Mac one (I didn't know there was such a difference). I thought that USB3.2 was a standard much like Thunderbolt 3/4 and that devices either support it or don't.

So I after much research have decided to buy an OWC MiniStack STX as it is supposed to work and have had other members verify that they had no issues. This will allow me to use my NVME card as well as put in a larger spinning hard drive for doing backups. So I have some questions for best practices?

1. If I put in a 4TB Toshiba hard disk inside the STX. I can format it with APFS that will allow you to use apples dynamic style partitioning. Can I setup TimeMachine to write to a spinning hard disk ? and it this considered acceptable or best practice?

2. In the past I have forgone Time Machine and just used CarbonCopy doing periodic disk snapshots to my old Lacie drive. I am wondering as the new drive is double the size, if I could use the APFS to make a second partition on the new hard drive to have weekly snapshots or would it make more sense to use the NVME for that? I will also set it up for monthly snapshot images to my NAS that does have some offsite functions.

3. Is Ventura now considered to be a stable platform OS? I am doing music production using Logic Pro X and I am to gather that still most of the plugins that I am using do not officially support Sonoma 14.x so I am hesitant to introduce more to go wrong.

 

[Rich B22]

I upgrade to a new Mac mini M2 Pro in June to do music production as a hobby in my retirement. I had an old iMac 5K 2014 but decided it was just too old so I retired that. From my old iMac, I have kept some or actually a lot of the thunderbolt and other devices that were plugged into it. I bought an apple TB2 to TB3 adaptor that seems to work on the most part. But found some troubles.

I have a Lacie TB2 2tb hard disk that I used for backup. its great for storage but when I try and use it with the new M2 Mini, it constantly keeps popping up an error that the drive was not ejected correctly when the Mac goes to sleep. According to Apple support this is my problem as they don't support external devices and they say it's just because the drive is too old. I don't get this problem if I plug the drive back into the iMac. So I am pretty sure it isn't a hardware problem with the drive.

So I went out and bought a USB3.2 external NVME case and a 1TB matching M.2 card. it's fast and great for backup but gets the exact same issue when the Mac goes to sleep. Apple support says that this is because it's a windows drive and not a Mac one (I didn't know there was such a difference). I thought that USB3.2 was a standard much like Thunderbolt 3/4 and that devices either support it or don't.

So I after much research have decided to buy an OWC MiniStack STX as it is supposed to work and have had other members verify that they had no issues. This will allow me to use my NVME card as well as put in a larger spinning hard drive for doing backups. So I have some questions for best practices?

1. If I put in a 4TB Toshiba hard disk inside the STX. I can format it with APFS that will allow you to use apples dynamic style partitioning. Can I setup TimeMachine to write to a spinning hard disk ? and it this considered acceptable or best practice?

2. In the past I have forgone Time Machine and just used CarbonCopy doing periodic disk snapshots to my old Lacie drive. I am wondering as the new drive is double the size, if I could use the APFS to make a second partition on the new hard drive to have weekly snapshots or would it make more sense to use the NVME for that? I will also set it up for monthly snapshot images to my NAS that does have some offsite functions.

3. Is Ventura now considered to be a stable platform OS? I am doing music production using Logic Pro X and I am to gather that still most of the plugins that I am using do not officially support Sonoma 14.x so I am hesitant to introduce more to go wrong.

My experience is mostly on Intel iMacs, so perhaps I may be wrong, but....
I have attached any and all external drives to my iMac with never a problem, however, I have a cheap HD mounted in a cheap external enclosure on my wife's M1 Mini and it often gets, "the drive was not ejected correctly" message. It may be the cable, or maybe Apple is putting something in their silicon so they can come out with their own overpriced externals?
In answer to your questions in my limited knowledge:
1) Time Machine can write to a spinning HD. Both my iMac & my wife's M1 have no problem writing to it and recovering from it. I strongly urge you to use TM along with CCC, as they can be complementary. I am a bit paranoid regarding backups and have 4 backup drives for CCC, another for TM and also back up to the cloud through Backblaze. The last may seem the ultimate redundancy, but what happens if you have a house fire or severe electrical problem (like a lightening hit) that fries everything?
2) I'm not sure what your intent is, but if you are thinking of putting CCC and TM on the same disk, DON'T. The whole point of redundant backups is to have them separated completely, so that if one is bad, you still have the other to restore your work. I'm also not that familiar with RAID, but isn't there a risk that if one disk goes bad, the other becomes unusable?
3) In my opinion, Ventura is very stable, however, if your M2 came with Sonoma, you probably don't have an option to downgrade to Ventura. If you're on Ventura already and comfortable with it, I'd stay there. You'll still get security updates and support for at least a couple of years. Quite honestly, IMO, other than security, there is very little benefit to me in most OS updates. Over the years, most everything I see added is just fluff with little groundbreaking innovation, that will make a significant difference in my workflow or save me time.
Good luck with all

 

[apostolosdt]

Strange. I have a LaCie 2TB 3TB attached to a Mini M1 via a 3.0 USB cable and to a MP 6,1 via a TB cable. No problems so far.

 

[TriciaMacMillan]

I use network drives since years, because then I don’t have to care about attaching them. All our Macs just automatically backup to the drives when possible, and if not, it’s deferred and taken care of as soon as possible.

I use Western Digital network drives, as they seem to provide the best value for their price for this specific purpose.

 

[bradman83]

So I went out and bought a USB3.2 external NVME case and a 1TB matching M.2 card. it's fast and great for backup but gets the exact same issue when the Mac goes to sleep. Apple support says that this is because it's a windows drive and not a Mac one (I didn't know there was such a difference). I thought that USB3.2 was a standard much like Thunderbolt 3/4 and that devices either support it or don't.

I have an NVME external M.2 enclosure (the Sabrent one you can find for like $25 USD on Amazon) with a 2TB SSD inside and I never have issues with dropped connections when the computer goes to sleep. How is the drive formatted? Did you reformat it as APFS or HFS+ when you first used it or is it still in FAT32 or ExFAT format?

 

[Ben J.]

Just a couple of thoughts; If the "eject" error only comes with waking from sleep, why not turn off sleep in system settings, and just set the display(s) to sleep after a period of inactivity? I have had my macs set up to run 24/7 for years now, and I can't see any downside to it.

I had the M2 mini for the last year, just switched to the M2 Pro, and have been very happy with Ventura. Tried Sonoma for a couple of weeks on the new mac, but rolled back to Ventura because of some issues. Most of the new things on Sonoma were superficial stuff that I'm not missing much. Ventura is solid.

Of course, your backups should be at least one on-site, and another in another place, that you update less often.

I haven't used Timemachine in years, only CCC. But both are fine. I suggest you just keep it simple. I have daily backups during the night. And sure, making a volume (as it's known in APFS) for TM or CCC backup is perfectly fine. (A partition is only needed if you want it to have another file system, and it will have to have a fixed size.)

 

[roadkill401]

My experience is mostly on Intel iMacs, so perhaps I may be wrong, but....
I have attached any and all external drives to my iMac with never a problem, however, I have a cheap HD mounted in a cheap external enclosure on my wife's M1 Mini and it often gets, "the drive was not ejected correctly" message. It may be the cable, or maybe Apple is putting something in their silicon so they can come out with their own overpriced externals?
In answer to your questions in my limited knowledge:
1) Time Machine can write to a spinning HD. Both my iMac & my wife's M1 have no problem writing to it and recovering from it. I strongly urge you to use TM along with CCC, as they can be complementary. I am a bit paranoid regarding backups and have 4 backup drives for CCC, another for TM and also back up to the cloud through Backblaze. The last may seem the ultimate redundancy, but what happens if you have a house fire or severe electrical problem (like a lightening hit) that fries everything?
2) I'm not sure what your intent is, but if you are thinking of putting CCC and TM on the same disk, DON'T. The whole point of redundant backups is to have them separated completely, so that if one is bad, you still have the other to restore your work. I'm also not that familiar with RAID, but isn't there a risk that if one disk goes bad, the other becomes unusable?
3) In my opinion, Ventura is very stable, however, if your M2 came with Sonoma, you probably don't have an option to downgrade to Ventura. If you're on Ventura already and comfortable with it, I'd stay there. You'll still get security updates and support for at least a couple of years. Quite honestly, IMO, other than security, there is very little benefit to me in most OS updates. Over the years, most everything I see added is just fluff with little groundbreaking innovation, that will make a significant difference in my workflow or save me time.
Good luck with all

The hardware issues was more of a background so that anyone responding didnt just say well hook up a ... and suggest something that i already have tried.

As for the backup. On my old iMac, i had timemachine fail more times in it would back something up but was impossible to ever restore it. I don't know if that was just that what was wrong or went wrong with my iMac made timemachine backup procedure just impossible or I don't fully understand how timemachine really worked. That was why i moved over to CarbonCopy in I could just snapshot the whole computer and the thought was that if it was working fine last week, if there was something that was no longer working then I could restore the snapshot far easier than trying to rebuild with Timemachine. (and with the iMac, it seemed it was a monthly occourance)

I am going to take it that the idea of backup of both TimeMachine and CarbonCopy on the same drive is wrong more from a total catastrophic issue, like a pipe bursting and the mac mini is dead, along with the hard drive that TimeMachine and CC was saved to so you'd effectively have zero computer and zero backup. Or really anything that causes that backup hard disk itself to fail. A backup is just that, a second copy of your system so that in case something gets erased or corrupted on your computer.

 

[roadkill401]

I have an NVME external M.2 enclosure (the Sabrent one you can find for like $25 USD on Amazon) with a 2TB SSD inside and I never have issues with dropped connections when the computer goes to sleep. How is the drive formatted? Did you reformat it as APFS or HFS+ when you first used it or is it still in FAT32 or ExFAT format?

this was not a cheep external drive. it is I gather a known issue with the Apple Silicon macs and is likely a zero priority for apple as they don't make any money if they fix it.

the drive was an APFS formatted drive. I was using it to write my backups to. The first three or four times it just gave an error and no foul. then about 3 weeks in after getting the mac it corrupted the drive enought that if it was plugged into the mac it caused a spontainious fatal error on the mac and reboot. there was no way to recover. as the new Apple Silicon mac don't have nearly as good a recovery partition in it doens't have a disk utility secontion any more where you can do things like format a disk or perform a simple drive fix, it rendered the whole unit unusable. But as I had an old intel mac, you could boot to the old recovery, then i could plug the drive into that computer (with a usbc-usba adaptor) and do the basic file directory fix and the drive could work again. Not all things with the M chip macs are better it seems

 

[HobeSoundDarryl]

I have the same Ministack STX and can offer you much clarity here.

Ministack STX seems like it is very effective at avoiding the somewhat commonplace issue of "unexpected ejections," which I am more than 90% confident is bugs in macOS. There are MANY threads about this issue with many users using many different enclosures & drives (& cables & firmware & hubs/powered hubs/no hubs, etc). There is DEFINITELY a problem(s) to be solved... and most likely only Apple can solve it by debugging macOS. I tested through TONS of drives and landed on Ministack STX as a reliable device that doesn't have this problem, even after letting Mac sleep every night.

TM can backup to either the internal HDD or SSD- no problem at all.

If you partition the internal HDD and use a segment of the whole for TM, that should work fine. However, 4TB sounds smallish for a TM backup, especially if you are going to partition it into some smaller slice for the TM portion. Go BIG. HDDs are cheap. I have a 20TB drive in my STX. The general rule of thumb is to tally up the total storage for all Macs in the house and then multiply by about 3 for minimum TM storage. That covers your immediate backup needs plus what you may grow in files into the future.

You've already learned that you don't want to "double up" TM and CCC with the same disc. Keep that separate. Their approaches are substantially different and each would benefit from being on their own drives. Your recovery risk would also be reduced by having backups on TWO drives instead of both on one.

One part that appears to be lacking but you seem to grasp a relevant risk scenario: get one of your fresh backups OFFSITE to protect against fire/flood/theft scenarios. It does little good to have 20 complete backups if they are all at the same location and one of those scenarios occurs.

I use 2 bare HDDs for TM with one always stored offsite. Every 30 days I swap them, so my offsite backup is no older than about 29 days. I have some other file sharing between Macs as well as some other backup solutions going too, to not make the 30 days timing pose a great risk to me. BUT KEY HERE- KEY- is having a relatively fresh backup OFFSITE too. I store my offsite backup at my bank in a safe deposit box. I use a bare drive dock for TM updates and then slip the OFFSITE one in a plastic case for transport to- and storage at- the bank.

Other people will use a single HDD and some cloud storage options to get the OFFSITE scenarios covered. I'm generally anti-cloud for this kind of use. But others are perfectly happy and cloud is a great option if you don't want to swap two physical drives on a regular basis. An OFFSITE backup in any form is more important than the specific way you accomplish it: 2 drives or 1 + cloud… just get a reasonably up-to-date backup OFFSITE. Odds in data loss will plunge as soon as one backup is held some distance (miles+) from your Mac and local TM or CCC backup.

So while Ministack STX can host your TM HDD if you like, you really should adopt at least a TWO TM (or CCC) backups approach. My Ministack holds a BIG HDD that I use for long-term file storage- like lots of media to flow to AppleTVs around the house. I could allocate it or a partition of it for TM but I prefer the 2 bare drives approach myself. If I wanted to adopt the monthly swap strategy, it would be a hassle to remove the drive in the STX to swap in another drive every- in my case- 30 days. The bare drives slide in and out of one of those docks like old game cartridges into consoles: EASY & QUICK.

Ask questions if you need more. You are on the right track and hopefully the above will help you.

 

[HDFan]

i had timemachine fail more times

TM backups tend to fail.

I am going to take it that the idea of backup of both TimeMachine and CarbonCopy on the same drive is wrong more from a total catastrophic issue,

Yes.

If you partition the internal HDD and use a segment of the whole for TM,

As above, not a good idea. The recommended 3-2-1 backup strategy, with only one being TM if used, is best implemented on unique devices.

 

[roadkill401]

I have the same Ministack STX and can offer you much clarity here.

Ministack STX seems like it is very effective at avoiding the somewhat commonplace issue of "unexpected ejections," which I am more than 90% confident is bugs in macOS. There are MANY threads about this issue with many users using many different enclosures & drives (& cables & firmware & hubs/powered hubs/no hubs, etc). There is DEFINITELY a problem(s) to be solved... and most likely only Apple can solve it by debugging macOS. I tested through TONS of drives and landed on Ministack STX as a reliable device that doesn't have this problem, even after letting Mac sleep every night.

TM can backup to either the internal HDD or SSD- no problem at all.

If you partition the internal HDD and use a segment of the whole for TM, that should work fine. However, 4TB sounds smallish for a TM backup, especially if you are going to partition it into some smaller slice for the TM portion. Go BIG. HDDs are cheap. I have a 20TB drive in my STX. The general rule of thumb is to tally up the total storage for all Macs in the house and then multiply by about 3 for minimum TM storage. That covers your immediate backup needs plus what you may grow in files into the future.

You've already learned that you don't want to "double up" TM and CCC with the same disc. Keep that separate. Their approaches are substantially different and each would benefit from being on their own drives. Your recovery risk would also be reduced by having backups on TWO drives instead of both on one.

One part that appears to be lacking but you seem to grasp a relevant risk scenario: get one of your fresh backups OFFSITE to protect against fire/flood/theft scenarios. It does little good to have 20 complete backups if they are all at the same location and one of those scenarios occurs.

I use 2 bare HDDs for TM with one always stored offsite. Every 30 days I swap them, so my offsite backup is no older than about 29 days. I have some other file sharing between Macs as well as some other backup solutions going too, to not make the 30 days timing pose a great risk to me. BUT KEY HERE- KEY- is having a relatively fresh backup OFFSITE too. I store my offsite backup at my bank in a safe deposit box. I use a bare drive dock for TM updates and then slip the OFFSITE one in a plastic case for transport to- and storage at- the bank.

Other people will use a single HDD and some cloud storage options to get the OFFSITE scenarios covered. I'm generally anti-cloud for this kind of use. But others are perfectly happy and cloud is a great option if you don't want to swap two physical drives on a regular basis. An OFFSITE backup in any form is more important than the specific way you accomplish it: 2 drives or 1 + cloud… just get a reasonably up-to-date backup OFFSITE. Odds in data loss will plunge as soon as one backup is held some distance (miles+) from your Mac and local TM or CCC backup.

So while Ministack STX can host your TM HDD if you like, you really should adopt at least a TWO TM (or CCC) backups approach. My Ministack holds a BIG HDD that I use for long-term file storage- like lots of media to flow to AppleTVs around the house. I could allocate it or a partition of it for TM but I prefer the 2 bare drives approach myself. If I wanted to adopt the monthly swap strategy, it would be a hassle to remove the drive in the STX to swap in another drive every- in my case- 30 days. The bare drives slide in and out of one of those docks like old game cartridges into consoles: EASY & QUICK.

Ask questions if you need more. You are on the right track and hopefully the above will help you.

I did get the STX and it does seem to be working OK. the first one that i got was what I felt DOA. The unit would only recognize the NVME if I didn't install a HD inside. As soon as a HD went in, the NVME didn't show up on the mac any more. As well, after about 45 min it gave of a large crackling sound and shut itself completely down. At that point i disconnected it and RMA that sucker back. The replacement seems to work fine, except the green power/transfer led for the nvme doens't work. I am told that might be because of the brand of nvme that I have. Its mostly cosmetic to me.

As for the for the HD in the unit. I happen to have bought 2 WD Red (SMR) 4tb drives for a Synology DS220+ that I really don't need right now. I figured it would make more sense to reallocate them to the new Mac Mini than spending more money that I don't really have to buying a new drive that the cost of now seems to be double what I paid just over a year ago.

Following your TM size, I have the one mac mini M2 inside the house that is actively being used. it's got the 500gb drive inside of that is currently around 200gb used. Most of this actually is the software loaded on the machine. I try and move most of my data off the mac now onto the STX nvme drive (1tb) from amazon prime day sale.

I am disabled (cannot work for health reasons) and upgraded to this mac to make music and keep my mind entertained. I do some graphics work, a touch of programming, photography, but nothing in the professional level of things. So I am looking at the TM as a solution honestly to fix the Apple bad programming problems. Like in the past 6 months that I have had this Mac Mini, I have lost 3-4 Logic Pro songs that I was working on due to unexplained file corruption. in something went wrong and either the program crashed while working on it and left the file in an unrecoverable state, or something else that when i tried to reload what i thought was saved it says that file is unreadable. I was thinking that TM if it can backup hourly then chances are that the amount of work lost will be smaller rather than catastrophic or not require me to constantly remember to save-as all the time with <trackname>v+1 just to try and have a fallback version.

I came from an IT background so the muti version and keep some offsite is understood. I don't know if I really need that level of protection. its more for the accidental loss or user screwup loss protection. if my house burnt down or is flooded, then i think i'd have much bigger issues than loosing a tune that I had been working on for my enjoyment or to throw onto Bandcamp so I can feel like I am a real artist.

I will look into perhaps pulling out the USB3 sata drive dock as I do have two of those WD Red drives. I could easily do a monthly drive swap with them and keep an offsite at my folks house who I have to visit weekly anyways to help them out.

thanks for the input and ideas.