Time Machine does not backup T5

[dai-leung]

Thank you for offering further help! You are a very helpful person!

CCC does not have a guide for people in how to optimize using APFS snapshots (strongly suggested only to be done on SSD's) .

Snapshots on a bootable external disk is something new. I actually wrote to CCC support asking for help to understand how to use snapshots on an external disk. But the reply was not helpful for a non computer person like me. I remain confused. If you have time to sort it out and point the way, it will offer another backup option to many users.

So you did an initial Time Machine backup to the SSD? Is that correct? If so, how long did it take? Is your old Mac also on Mojave? You said that you had a 2TB SSD. Is that correct? What size is the HDD you want to copy the Time Machine backup to? If you answer these questions, I can suggest a way that would be easiest to copy the Time Machine backup from the SSD to the HDD.

Yes, I did an initial TM backup on a 1TB encrypted SSD(Samsung T5). 500GB of data on a 1TB internal disk took about 3 hours to backup. Would like to copy the SSD backup to a spinning HD.

I paid $400 for the 1TB T5 SSD, but now a 2TB T5 is selling for $325 (B&H will refund tax). Thus if there is significant advantage of using a SSD to do backup, it is not out of the question. Even for Time Machine backup using HD, there is a case to be made to use SSD. Using HD, to prevent HD failure and lose all TM data, I have to use two HDs, TM-A and TM-B for redundancy whereas for SSD, I only need one as there is less chance of failure.

 

[treekram]

Thank you for offering further help! You are a very helpful person!


Snapshots on a bootable external disk is something new. I actually wrote to CCC support asking for help to understand how to use snapshots on an external disk. But the reply was not helpful for a non computer person like me. I remain confused. If you have time to sort it out and point the way, it will offer another backup option to many users.


Yes, I did an initial TM backup on a 1TB encrypted SSD(Samsung T5). 500GB of data on a 1TB internal disk took about 3 hours to backup. Would like to copy the SSD backup to a spinning HD.

I paid $400 for the 1TB T5 SSD, but now a 2TB T5 is selling for $325 (B&H will refund tax). Thus if there is significant advantage of using a SSD to do backup, it is not out of the question. Even for Time Machine backup using HD, there is a case to be made to use SSD. Using HD, to prevent HD failure and lose all TM data, I have to use two HDs, TM-A and TM-B for redundancy whereas for SSD, I only need one as there is less chance of failure.

You can try copying the Time Machine backup from the SSD to the HDD using your old Mac using the Apple instructions:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202380

As I said earlier, this failed on Mojave for me and a poster in another thread. However, this may work for you because your backup has only one backup date on it. Usually when people do this copy, they usually have many backup dates. Time Machine backups become more and more "tangled" (for the lack of a better term) as more backups are done and this is what's probably causing the problem in Mojave. The way that this copy works is that it makes a list of the files it's going to copy and this can take a while. Then it does the actual copy. You can tell when the copy is failing when it comes close to the end - it will say there's a minute left to go and then a few seconds and then it will go in a loop and it will never end - it will always say there's just a little more to go. Also, it will give information on how much it has copied. If it starts saying that it has copied, say, 550GB and your backup is 500GB, it has failed. In one attempt, I let it go and it was still going at 1TB for my ~660GB backup copy.

You didn't mention if you had Mojave on your old Mac. If you have High Sierra or an earlier OS, it should work.

If this doesn't work for you, you should next try doing a Time Machine backup to the HDD from your new Mac. Erase the HDD and make sure you select HFS+ encrypted if you want it encrypted. Again, because it's the first time, it should go relatively quickly. If you can do it overnight, say 8 hours, I think it would finish.

If that doesn't work or you had to interrupt the backup, there are other methods you can try - just post that it failed and I can go over instructions - but it would be good to know what OS your old Mac is running and the size of your the HDD you're using for the backup.

 

[dai-leung]

You can try copying the Time Machine backup from the SSD to the HDD using your old Mac using the Apple instructions:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202380

You didn't mention if you had Mojave on your old Mac. If you have High Sierra or an earlier OS, it should work.

If this doesn't work for you, you should next try doing a Time Machine backup to the HDD from your new Mac. Erase the HDD and make sure you select HFS+ encrypted if you want it encrypted. Again, because it's the first time, it should go relatively quickly. If you can do it overnight, say 8 hours, I think it would finish.M

Sincere thanks again for your kind assistance, detailed instructions and methods of copying. I hope they not only will help me but will help many future readers as well. My old Mac OS is El Capitan, so it should work.

 

[Weaselboy]

Do u mean “so it cannot be booted externally unless u supply the password”? So erase and encrypt an HD means that the contents of the HD can not be accessed unless a password is supplied and is a general method.

Yes, this is what I am after.

If you just format the CCC drive to APFS encrypted and do not go through the Filevault and Recovery partition steps mentioned at the CCC support article, your data will be on the drive. but you will not be able to option key boot to the disk. I don't care about having that feature, so I just formatted to encrypted APFS.

 

[dai-leung]

If you just format the CCC drive to APFS encrypted and do not go through the Filevault and Recovery partition steps mentioned at the CCC support article, your data will be on the drive. but you will not be able to option key boot to the disk. I don't care about having that feature, so I just formatted to encrypted APFS.

Thanks again for your clarification. I read https://bombich.com/kb/ccc5/working-filevault-encryption (suggested by @treekram ) several times and now understand using the erase and encrypt, CCC backup can not externally boot a Mac.

Just wondering, in this case if one has to use the non bootable CCC backup to fully restore a Mac, is apple’s “migration assistant” the correct way to do the restore?

 

[Weaselboy]

Just wondering, in this case if one has to use the non bootable CCC backup to fully restore a Mac, is apple’s “migration assistant” the correct way to do the restore?

That would be my plan if I had a total drive failure. Install new drive, then migration assistant after the OS install.

 

[treekram]

Thanks again for your clarification. I read https://bombich.com/kb/ccc5/working-filevault-encryption (suggested by @treekram ) several times and now understand using the erase and encrypt, CCC backup can not externally boot a Mac.

Just wondering, in this case if one has to use the non bootable CCC backup to fully restore a Mac, is apple’s “migration assistant” the correct way to do the restore?

I haven't done what you describe with APFS so I can't say what will happen.

However, I did have an old El Capitan partition that had to be moved from one HDD to another so I decided to create a HFS+ partition as Journaled, Encrypted. I then used CCC to copy to this partition. I can't remember if CCC asked but I do remember CCC saying something about converting to File Vault and sure enough, if I boot from this partition and run the fdesetup status command, it says file vault is enabled so even though the details are a bit hazy (I was doing a lot of moving of old OS partitions), I do know that the partition wasn't setup as file vault but got converted to file vault as the result of CCC cloning the partition. So, my guess is that CCC will do the same when you clone from your new Mini (APFS) to your SSD and thus and it should be bootable. If you're worried about it, you can go through the instructions that CCC for preparing your disk.