Time Machine and Carbon Copy Cloner

[DuncanWWilson]

Hello all!

Hope you are all doing well. Firstly, I’m fairly clued up on Macs and the differences between Time Machine and Carbon Copy Cloner 5. My question is about backup and security. I’d like to backup my Mac and an external drive I’m using. I have a 2 TB LaCie drive and a 1 TB WD drive.

If I use my 1 TB WD drive for my external data and Carbon Copy backups, can I use my 2 TB drive to backup my Mac and my 1 TB WD drive?

I prefer having more than one plan in place. My thinking is if my 1 TB drive fails, I have my 2 TB drive with Time Machine. If my 2 TB drive fails, I have my 1 TB drive with Carbon Copy backup.

How would you guys go about this? Any tips or recommendations such as partitioning drives and organising will be appreciated. I have these two drives to play with and looking to put them to their best use and have some level of redundancy in my backup plan.

Thanks!

 

[chscag]

Redundancy with backups is the smart thing to do. I personally like to keep my Time Machine backups on one drive and my CCC cloned backup on another. I actually make CCC backups on two external SSDs (Samsung T5s) alternating them every other day.

You can also choose to turn on the CCC option to use the "Safety Net" which will keep deleted files as long as the drive has room. Also both Time Machine and CCC can create "Snapshots" which is another safety measure which can be used to restore your data in the event of data loss.

 

[steve1960]

What is the volume of data you need to backup now and how do you expect it to grow over time? Obviously 300GB and 3TB require a different strategy and storage capacity. Are you concerned about security or just loss of information if a drive fails? Backup security really means you need an on site / off site plan like using the Cloud in some way.

For me its around 2TB right now the largest portion being movies. I use an external RAID box with two 4TB drives set to RAID 1. So I have 4TB of usable space and a mirror image of whatever I put on drive A. Keeps it simple. I have mostly been concerned with drive failure to date not security although my photographs and home videos are also backed up off site.

I think your plan looks OK I would not partition the drives, backups need to be as simple as possible with as little manual intervention as possible so that they don't get overlooked or important data is missed.

 

[DuncanWWilson]

What is the volume of data you need to backup now and how do you expect it to grow over time? Obviously 300GB and 3TB require a different strategy and storage capacity. Are you concerned about security or just loss of information if a drive fails? Backup security really means you need an on site / off site plan like using the Cloud in some way.

For me its around 2TB right now the largest portion being movies. I use an external RAID box with two 4TB drives set to RAID 1. So I have 4TB of usable space and a mirror image of whatever I put on drive A. Keeps it simple. I have mostly been concerned with drive failure to date not security although my photographs and home videos are also backed up off site.

I think your plan looks OK I would not partition the drives, backups need to be as simple as possible with as little manual intervention as possible so that they don't get overlooked or important data is missed.

Thank you for both of your replies. I should have mentioned that I use iCloud for pretty much all that I can. I pay for the 200 GB plan, so I have all of my photos, music and so in iCloud. As well as having all my documents stored in my Mac’s internal memory, they’re also in iCloud Drive. Anything I do with documents or my desktop on my Mac is immediately uploaded to iCloud. Ah, you no the story!

I also should have made it clear that my Mac’s internal memory is not big, and neither is the size of the backup. It’s 250 GB, with a backup size of around 150 GB. I usually rely more on iCloud and external storage, hence the small internal memory size.

So, with this being said, if I use the 1 TB drive to store my CCC data and some video and picture data, then I use the 2 TB drive to backup my Mac and my 1 TB external drive with Time Machine, would that be ok? As I said, my thinking is that is the 1 TB drive failed I have a backup of it on my 2 TB drive. If the 2 TB drive fails I have my 1 TB drive with CCC on it. On top of this, I have most of my critical data in iCloud.

Thanks,

Duncan.

 

[BrianBaughn]

No one has mentioned what version of macOS is involved here nor has anything been said about a "bootable" CCC copy.

Is a bootable CCC clone important to you?

 

[DuncanWWilson]

Latest version of OS on latest MacBook Pro 13”. A bootable copy of my Mac is important to me insofar as it is an alternative to Time Machine in case that fails. I don’t like putting all my eggs in the one basket.

 

[BrianBaughn]

Latest version of OS on latest MacBook Pro 13”. A bootable copy of my Mac is important to me insofar as it is an alternative to Time Machine in case that fails. I don’t like putting all my eggs in the one basket.

There are specific details with CCC and a bootable clone of Catalina. Basically, the clone partition must be on an APFS formatted drive. You can use CCC to backup Catalina on an HFS+ formatted drive but it won't be bootable.

 

[AhKin]

Does anyone here use Carbon Copy cloner with Google drive ?

I had started a process which seemed ideal a few days ago. this consisted in creating tasks backing up specific folders from my HD with CCC via the google drive stream. However , today, it seems to have started eating up all my HD space by filling up the cache. THis is bizarre as it was not doing this at first...


None of my folders are set to 'offline' neither...

Any idea ?

 

[Ld27]

There are specific details with CCC and a bootable clone of Catalina. Basically, the clone partition must be on an APFS formatted drive. You can use CCC to backup Catalina on an HFS+ formatted drive but it won't be bootable.

Great Avatar Brian! 👍🏼😀👍🏼

 

[steve1960]

Its kind of strange given I have gone totally Apple but I have not needed to reinstall from a backup yet, which is why I chose the Apple ecosystem. I am sure at some point in the future I will come crying to you after a system crash but it has not happened in the last 10 years...............

 

[Apple_Robert]

Its kind of strange given I have gone totally Apple but I have not needed to reinstall from a backup yet, which is why I chose the Apple ecosystem. I am sure at some point in the future I will come crying to you after a system crash but it has not happened in the last 10 years...............

It is good that you haven't had a problem. Just make sure you have multiple backups from different backup apps. Time Machine isn'y always reliable on then-M Macs.