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Is Time Machine Good or is there something better?
- Thread starter crowe-t
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Yes Time Machine is good, but I don't fully trust it, having had several USB Time Machine drives go out to lunch, so I supplement with Carbonite and by using a Synology DS414j NAS with 12TB preRAID.
I view Time Machine as an easy way to get files back from different snapshots; however, i've found that especially with a plain external USB drive, it seems easy for the backup to get corrupted. Several years ago I switched to using a Synology NAS for Time Machine and have had good results. My kids, at college, also share a NAS, and previously had good success with a Time Capsule. Still, I find I want off site backups, so I use Carbonite for that. As we have multiple Macs (basic desktop, MBA, misc others, including a pimped out hackintosh dedicated to video and animation), we each have our desktop doing both time machine and Carbonite, and the other machines doing only time machine to our respective Synology NAS. We know that important stuff (e.g., photos, financial records, etc.) needs to be on the desktop machine.
Years ago I was using Time Machine to back up to a ReadyNAS, which has Time Machine functionality. Every few weeks it got corrupted and it wanted a complete do-over. After a couple of months of this, I gave up and bought a Time Capsule. Rock solid for years now.
Try CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper.
Both are free to download and use for 30 days.
Either one will create a BOOTABLE cloned backup of your internal drive.
The clone will "look and behave" EXACTLY as the internal would, if you boot from it.
CCC and SD can do "incremental" backups as well. Go much faster than a "full clone" (complete re-copy of everything).
CCC can also clone the recovery partition.
CCC can also "archive" older (changed) items from the source drive (similar to the way TM saves copies of old files).
For me, a cloned backup is simply SUPERIOR to what TM does.
I can boot from the backup and use it to do maintenance on my internal drive.
I can mount it in the finder, and copy one file, several files, folders, or RE-clone the entire drive back to the internal drive.
Nothing will "get you going" faster than a bootable cloned backup when you have your first "I can't boot!!!" moment.
And if you do a major system software upgrade that doesn't work out for you, NOTHING makes it as easy to "get back, get back, get back to where you once belonged" as does a cloned backup.
Both are free to download and use for 30 days.
Either one will create a BOOTABLE cloned backup of your internal drive.
The clone will "look and behave" EXACTLY as the internal would, if you boot from it.
CCC and SD can do "incremental" backups as well. Go much faster than a "full clone" (complete re-copy of everything).
CCC can also clone the recovery partition.
CCC can also "archive" older (changed) items from the source drive (similar to the way TM saves copies of old files).
For me, a cloned backup is simply SUPERIOR to what TM does.
I can boot from the backup and use it to do maintenance on my internal drive.
I can mount it in the finder, and copy one file, several files, folders, or RE-clone the entire drive back to the internal drive.
Nothing will "get you going" faster than a bootable cloned backup when you have your first "I can't boot!!!" moment.
And if you do a major system software upgrade that doesn't work out for you, NOTHING makes it as easy to "get back, get back, get back to where you once belonged" as does a cloned backup.
All the suggestions are good, I think. I had a good backup strategy involving Dropbox, TM, a rotating drive system with one in a fire safe, and copies of important data on my NAS, but I didn't have a complete off-site backup. I kept thinking about it, but did nothing.
Then some friends who were faithfully making TM backups had a disaster. They lived in Coffee Park and had only enough time to grab a few things and run from the fires, and those few things didn't include their TM drives. All gone.
After that I signed up for Backblaze, which is only one of the several cloud backup services in existence. I pay $50/year for my system drive and one of my externals to be backed up.
Then some friends who were faithfully making TM backups had a disaster. They lived in Coffee Park and had only enough time to grab a few things and run from the fires, and those few things didn't include their TM drives. All gone.
After that I signed up for Backblaze, which is only one of the several cloud backup services in existence. I pay $50/year for my system drive and one of my externals to be backed up.
Thanks for the advice! I'll use either CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper and look into an off site backup.
The inability to create a large storage version for time machine backups is unsettling.. I have a client with about 10 MBA (128-256GB) sizes, don't need tons of space but really want an onsite consolidated repository for time machine backups, in addition to several offsite options in place.. isn't there SOMETHING that is reliable that isn't a time capsule