Can Time Machine back up to online data recovery site?

[bailmdb]

I'm interested in the site Carbonite to back up my Mac, but I want to use Time Machine and have complete backups of my system. I'm assuming I can't use Time Machine on that site, so what's important is whether or not I can conduct a complete backup of my system on Carbonite that would allow me to completely recover my system in the event of a failure or a new computer...something like that.

Am I better off just buying an external HDD and using Time Machine?

 

[spinnerlys]

Even though Carbonite does not mention any storage capacity limits, to upload the complete Mac OS X installation alone will take a while, as just that uses 8GB of HDD space.

How much data do you have in GBs, that you think, you can upload it to an off-site server? How fast is your internet upload speed?

You can test it here. http://www.speedtest.net/

PS: 100KB/s (800Kbit/s) upload speed will allow you to upload 10GB of data in approximately 29 to 30 hours.

 

[SXR]

I'm using Carbonite aswell, until I get a external HDD and backup to that aswell. But Carbonite is great. Especially the iPhone app, where I can even stream my entire music library because its backed up there.

 

[miles01110]

Am I better off just buying an external HDD and using Time Machine?

Yes.

 

[patrick0brien]

The best method would be to back up locally with Time Machine, and further back up that Time Machine file to Crashplan/Carbonite, etc.

 

[SXR]

The best method would be to back up locally with Time Machine, and further back up that Time Machine file to Crashplan/Carbonite, etc.

Thats a great idea, but Carbonite only backs up from internal HDD's and not external , where you would backup to with Time Machine.

 

[stridemat]

Thats a great idea, but Carbonite only backs up from internal HDD's and not external , where you would backup to with Time Machine.

Have two external hard drives. Make a full initial backup on each of them and then store one off site. Say on weekly basis alternate between them. The first backup on the new hard drive each time will take some time, but you will have a good working redundancy on all but your newest files.

 

[SXR]

Have two external hard drives. Make a full initial backup on each of them and then store one off site. Say on weekly basis alternate between them. The first backup on the new hard drive each time will take some time, but you will have a good working redundancy on all but your newest files.

yes I get it. But with store one off-site, what off-site backup do you mean?

 

[Tumbleweed666]

The best method would be to back up locally with Time Machine, and further back up that Time Machine file to Crashplan/Carbonite, etc.

No it wouldn't, because a TM software error (or an undetected hardware one prior to the copy) would leave you SOL.

What would be a better solution would be to back up locally with Time Machine, and separately back up to Crashplan/Carbonite/etc.

 

[patrick0brien]

No it wouldn't, because a TM software error (or an undetected hardware one prior to the copy) would leave you SOL.

What would be a better solution would be to back up locally with Time Machine, and separately back up to Crashplan/Carbonite/etc.

-Tumbleweed666

Sorry, I misspoke. Your method is what I meant - two, serialized backups. A Local TM, then that Local TM further backed up to Carbonite/Crashplan.

 

[Tumbleweed666]

-Tumbleweed666

Sorry, I misspoke. Your method is what I meant - two, serialized backups. A Local TM, then that Local TM further backed up to Carbonite/Crashplan.

Nope, that's not my method ! As you describe it above , both backups use the exact same, single backup mechanism = TM. So if there is a TM issue (and they exist, I have experienced one), then you are screwed because you have a single point of failure = TM.

My method is (1) backup using TM, (2) Backup using another, entirely separate mechanism, preferably offsite, and nothing at all to do with TM. Think about it, suppose unknown to you there is a bug which means all your TM's are now corrupt. Getting the offsite copy isnt going to help you!

FWIW I use three backup mechanisms, all different - TM running all the time, online backups, and clones of my main HD. I thought I was paranoid but then someone described to me their four different methods, LOL

Oh, I nearly forget, one other cardinal rule of backups, once in a while, test. Select a file at random and restore it. I've known systems run for months or longer with backups that weren't working at all! You dont want the time to discover that, to be when you just had a disk crash Ideally, you'd like to discover it before then

 

[patrick0brien]

Nope, that's not my method !

-Tumbleweed666

I see. My apologies for the misunderstanding. One thing: I've noticed a perfect record of Time Machines reporting errors. It does it if there is one, and not if there isn't.

I've heard legends that there have been folks with bad Time Machine files that Time Machine has not reported errors, so for a while there, I was a little paranoid, but now that I have a large enough sampling of real world Time Machine usage, I'm more worried about lightning strikes than a bad, unreported Time Machine backup.

One note: I have had my share of bad Time Machine backups. A few because the drive itself died. but the rest have been solved by power cycling the drive, then bouncing the computer. All gone.