Time Machine backup solution for multiple macs

[soloz2]

I have three macs. Two are personal MacBook airs for my partner and I and the third is a MacBook Pro I use for work. I have iCloud and use that to back up our phones and iPads, but Time Machine can’t use that and I want to create backups for our machines.

Right now I have a 2TB external drive for my MacBook Pro that is used as a Time Machine backup location, but I’ve had incidents where it doesn’t reliably connect and then it doesn’t back up. Last night I almost lost a lot of data when I had to refresh my firmware after a failed update and the. I realized it had been nearly 3 weeks since the last update. Not good.

Now I’m wondering if a NAS would be better and allow me to back up all 3 machines and also store some media to share across my network.
Alternatively, would a larger DAS that I share on my network be better?

I used to have a windows home server (actually still have it) but that’s been outdated for years and I basically just kept it because I need to get files off before it can be scrapped. This was when I had all PCs. I’ve since switched to Macs so something like this that allows for backup and restore and file sharing would be ideal.
I had been looking at a synology, but I’m not so sure anymore with them locking into their drives now.

 

[smirking]

A NAS would be ideal if you're backing up multiple machines, but anything network based is going to be even less reliable on always giving you the backup you thought you had. Time Machine is great, but the drawback is that it's prone to corruption and the kind of issues you ran into when you missed three weeks of backups.

But speed wise, a good NAS on a decent WiFi network should work fine. You just need to have backups for your backup and I'd say that regardless of if you were using Time Machine.

For the record, I have Time Machine on my NAS, but I also periodically take a direct clone of my computers using Super Duper.

 

[chabig]

For the record, I have Time Machine on my NAS, but I also periodically take a direct clone of my computers using Super Duper.

I do the same using Carbon Copy Cloner. Each MacBook has its own dedicated external SSD. These are $100 for 1TB, $150 for 2TB.

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[soloz2]

Thanks for the thoughts so far. I did have one other thought in that I was originally thinking of just a larger NAS with a separate partition I'd use for my business computer, but I may need to stick with a dedicated individual drive or DAS for my business computer so it can be separate for HIPAA compliance. Maybe keeping things separate or even something like a Beestation for personal computers and a connected drive for business. I'm going to look into some of the things mentioned like Super Duper and Carbon Copy.

 

[chabig]

I've never seen that MacRumors Amazon affiliate text before. I did not include any affiliate information in the URL I posted. Is this new? It looks like MR is automatically appending their info to posted Amazon links.