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What do laptop people do for time machine?

Home: Mac mini server with external HD for TM backups. Office: TB dock with external drive attached for TM backups. I also have an external SSD with a SuperDuper! clone of my laptop boot drive.

iCloud Drive is not a backup. Let me say that again: iCloud Drive is not a backup. Sure, it can act as one in case of sudden catastrophic hardware failure i.e. you can use it to download all your documents to a new Mac if your old one goes on fire or is stolen, but if you delete a file from your iCloud Drive folder locally it's gone from the cloud and any other synced Macs too.
 
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mikepro said:
I used to always use a Time Capsule when I had laptops, but that's long since died. And, for past 4 years I've been on an iMac with a dedicated external attached for Time Machine.

Selling the iMac and moving back to a 16" Macbook Pro. Wondering what people do for a wireless Time Machine solution? I'd rather not have to connect external to the Macbook, just have it happen automatically like the Time Capsule used to. The router I have to use for my fiber optic internet doesn't support plugging in an external.

So, what's the best way to do wireless time machine backups these days? Are there good standalone wireless drives? Should I resurrect my 2009 mac mini as a time machine server? Maybe I don't even need time machine anymore, since I have 2TB iCloud space, so my important docs and photos already get backed up...
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I use an external hard drive connected to an AirPort Extreme’s USB 2 port. This is in effect a Time Capsule with an external rather than internal drive.
 
Documents stored in Onedrive on Mac, synced to Cloud.
Mac server which has a copy of OneDrive, synced from Cloud.
Mac Server also runs a Time Machine Server which all Macs backup to, wirelessly.
Month end SuperDuper Clone of OneDrive from Server, stored offsite on rotating disk set (last 3 months).

Possibly overkill, as I have 6 copies of data at various points in time :). House burns down - I have offsite backups for the last three month ends and the working set in OneDrive. Cloud loses my data - offsite backups and the working set on my Macs.
 
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alFR said:
iCloud Drive is not a backup. Let me say that again: iCloud Drive is not a backup.
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You will never convince them of that. None of the cloud storage services have an SLA, but the Entitled are forever convinced that just because they put a single copy of a file in Dropbox/Google Drive/OneDrive or whatever, that they're somehow protected.

Also amusing are the ones who think they don't need to back up Github.
 
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Time Machine to an SMB/Avahi server VM on my home server, with ZFS snapshots of the VM sent to a secondary server.
 
I’m using ARQ backup. 1tb cloud backup storage for 4 euro a month and if I’m running love I’m just using my OneDrive as backup destination in ARQ
 
I have never been able to get TM to work reliably backing up a 4 TB volume on either Synology or QNAP. The backups are slow even with wired thunderbolt or 10 Mb ethernet connection and keep getting corrupted. I have to wipe and restart them. With new MacOS and NAS firmware versions I'm struggling right now to get TM working on a QNAP. Been working through QNAP forums (a lot of people are having this problem) for 2 days trying to figure out how to get it to work. Finally got the drive to show in the list of TM disks, but then the backup fails. May have to log a support case.

Have no problems with CCC backups to either Synology, QNAP, Backblaze or Crashplan. Crashplan unfortunately can be very slow. An incremental backup of my 54 TB dataset has been running for months. Have no idea if/when it will ever complete due to the slow upload speed. No problems with Backblaze.

In any event make sure you have a 3-2-1 backup strategy in place. Only one of these backups should be TM as they tend to fail.
 
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When it's something important - I plug in an external SSD and that does the trick 99% of the time. Offline copies are always good to have - for me, that's usually backups from my mirrorless camera. If you need ton of space, go for a HDD but I'd get any SSD/any speed over a mechanical for longevity.

On my day to day though, I've honestly been using Google Drive. Their new(er) file stream version works night and day difference than the old way of having to sync files manually. I now keep mostly everything in the cloud and if I need it, I simply go to the folder and drag it down to localize it.

I also discovered I get a *ton* of free storage though my college email so I've been trying to test the limits of what I have.
 
I rotate two or three external USB HDDs with Time Machine. From time to time, I get a new one and store the oldest one. This just happened as I upgraded from MBP 15" to MBP 16" M1; I took full backups of the old computer onto three HDDs, put one of them into a safe and got a brand new one to the rotation.

I keep my backups encrypted, which sometimes makes things a bit more complicated (I am looking at you, migration assistant). I store my backups in different locations, two on-site, one off-site. I take a backup a) when I remember to do it or b) I've created something I do not want to lose.

This requires some attention, but I have learned my lesson the hard way in the past.
 
alFR said:
Home: Mac mini server with external HD for TM backups. Office: TB dock with external drive attached for TM backups. I also have an external SSD with a SuperDuper! clone of my laptop boot drive.

iCloud Drive is not a backup. Let me say that again: iCloud Drive is not a backup. Sure, it can act as one in case of sudden catastrophic hardware failure i.e. you can use it to download all your documents to a new Mac if your old one goes on fire or is stolen, but if you delete a file from your iCloud Drive folder locally it's gone from the cloud and any other synced Macs too.
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Yeah ... I have important files backed up to iCloud, but the iCloud folder and everything else for that matter, is also backed up to 4 drives, with the 4th going into a fireproof safe, as well as a Time Machine backup. I've lost files before and I won't do it again.
 
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petsk said:
If you want to schedule how often time machine is backing up you can use the time machine editor app.
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I love TimeMachineEditor, but when I tried running it under Big Sur, it just started randomly missing backups. Maybe it was a fluke, but I reverted to the standard time machine settings. I haven't gone back and tried it again under Monterey.
 
jvlfilms said:
On my day to day though, I've honestly been using Google Drive. Their new(er) file stream version works night and day difference than the old way of having to sync files manually. I now keep mostly everything in the cloud and if I need it, I simply go to the folder and drag it down to localize it.

I also discovered I get a *ton* of free storage though my college email so I've been trying to test the limits of what I have.
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Been using this for years, also getting UNLIMITED Google Drive storage from my University (how they managed that deal is beyond me).

Couldn't get the *new & improved" Google Drive for Desktop to work for days after they force-migrated me from backup & sync (which was previously awesome because I had boatloads of photos, logic pro projects, and music on external/internal drives). However, during the "down" period I tried some other cloud services (Box and MS OneDrive) and they were both surprisingly inferior for backups.

One caution with Google Drive -- they've got some *mild* issues with occasionally corrupting photos. You can find these corrupted photos by sorting by size and finding any "zero bytes" photos in your Google Drive. I've got a few of them, unfortunately.
 
3SQ Machine said:
One caution with Google Drive -- they've got some *mild* issues with occasionally corrupting photos. You can find these corrupted photos by sorting by size and finding any "zero bytes" photos in your Google Drive. I've got a few of them, unfortunately.
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Yikes, that does not sound mild to me! Any "backup" that's corrupting photos doesn't sound like much of a backup.
 
jvlfilms said:
I'd get any SSD/any speed over a mechanical for longevity.
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Not necessarily true. Lots of dependencies - SSD type, TBW, warranties, consumer or datacenter version, etc. See the Backblaze bathtub post. The data so far indicates roughly the same lifetime, but we need another 3 years of data to do a real comparison.
 
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