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Don’t forget archival. I back up to a das and a nas hourly and archive every week to 3 different forms of storage plus a cloud and I’m testing a different form of storage for longevity.

After rereading that I think I may be a little paranoid.
I was about to post about it seeming a bit paranoid then I saw your last sentence ?
 
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I keep most of my data (encrypted) in the cloud with a drive connected to my docking station using time machine.
 
What do laptop people do for backup?

Why... connect an external drive and back up to it, as you would back up any other computer.

Although... I've never used tm, not ever.
I use CarbonCopyCloner for backups...
 
I still have a 2tb Time Capsule and use it as an 802.1ac wifi access point. But I stopped using it for backup, every so often I would get a message that the drive failed an integrity check and I would have to start over with a full backup.

I re-purposed my 2012 quad Mini as a server when I upgraded to a new Mini in 2020, it is connected to my router with gigabit ethernet. It has taken the place of the Time Capsule for backups now, so there really is no difference on the client side. To do this, you need to enable the Mac as a Time Machine destination. That is something I found very un-intuitive, but a google search found some instructions and it's worked perfectly for the past year and a half.
 
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Although I still have my TimeCapsule from years ago, that's no longer the primary.
I use an external drive and use that for TimeMachine - 8TB Seagate external drive for my current 15" MBP.
I'm waiting on my new 16" MBP Pro and had planned on using that drive, but Costco has it now on sale for $120. Great price for a backup drive.

I have TM on 24/7 connected using usb.
 
We backup all our Macs to a Synology NAS using Time Machine: iMacs over ethernet, laptops via wi-fi. We periodically attach USB disks for extra near-line TM backups and use BackBlaze for off-site storage.
 
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We also back up all Macs - now MacBook Pros and 1 Airs - to Sinology NAS through time machine. Mostly wireless, but sometimes through ethernet.
 
Don’t forget archival. I back up to a das and a nas hourly and archive every week to 3 different forms of storage plus a cloud and I’m testing a different form of storage for longevity.

After rereading that I think I may be a little paranoid.
Seems reasonable to me.

I do:

  • Continuous Backblaze
  • Continuous Time Machine to TrueNAS with redundancy
  • Manual SuperDuper not quite often enough, alternating offsite disks

What are you testing for longevity? I am searching for an affordable tape backup solution that supports ~20TB, which would allow me to keep a SuperDuper clone from every other month or so practically forever. I want this since none of my current strategies will protect me from file corruption (including sneaky ransomware) on the primary source that goes unnoticed for an extended period of time.
 
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I'm doing Time Machine to my Sandisk External SSD. I connect it every week and do a backup, personally I don't keep a lot of files on the local storage it's more for apps and scripts.. But I do back it up just in case because I have a lot of stuff going on in Visual Studio.

Other than that I backup my personal stuff to iCloud and my work stuff to OneDrive.
 
I have 4 external HDDs I use for TM backups, 2 HDDs are stored "off-site". The 2 HDDs I have at home I connect 1-2 times per week to update the backups and the off-site ones I update 1-2 times per month.
 
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.
Google is changing that, everybody is on workspace now even if your university IT didn't tell you yet. You'll have until this summer to migrate stuff out if it's more than what your school negotiated with google. And your school will likely negotiate something silly like 20-50gb per student.

Google changes and abandons their services for their products all the time, I used to use Drive as an offline backup now I don't trust it.
 
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How does TimeMacine work with a laptop? I don't use to for long stretches at a time so, if I close the lid is TM still working or will it freeze? My old MacBook had network issues and would keep losing the NAS and I used to use CCC with a USB drive from time to time but I'd like to have TM working properly on my new M1 MacBook.
 
You can just use any USB/thunderbolt external drive for TM. If you close the lid (put the MacBook into standby) the backup to the external drive will halt. I've never used TM with wireless or network drives.
 
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How does TimeMacine work with a laptop? I don't use to for long stretches at a time so, if I close the lid is TM still working or will it freeze? My old MacBook had network issues and would keep losing the NAS and I used to use CCC with a USB drive from time to time but I'd like to have TM working properly on my new M1 MacBook.

Time Machine will do local backups if you have the space available and your external backup source isn't available.

Also, if you turn on Powernap and leave the MacBook connected to power when you aren't using it, it will wake up to perform Time Machine backups.
 
Time Machine will do local backups if you have the space available and your external backup source isn't available.

Also, if you turn on Powernap and leave the MacBook connected to power when you aren't using it, it will wake up to perform Time Machine backups.
Powernap seems to have disappeared from my M1 laptop running Monterey.
 
Seems reasonable to me.

I do:

  • Continuous Backblaze
  • Continuous Time Machine to TrueNAS with redundancy
  • Manual SuperDuper not quite often enough, alternating offsite disks

What are you testing for longevity? I am searching for an affordable tape backup solution that supports ~20TB, which would allow me to keep a SuperDuper clone from every other month or so practically forever. I want this since none of my current strategies will protect me from file corruption (including sneaky ransomware) on the primary source that goes unnoticed for an extended period of time.
I started testing CFast cards about 1 1/2 years ago. Just testing some cheap ones and a few “good” ones. Also, I do update archival formats every 10 years not because the drives or the discs are are old but because I want to be able to retrieve the data without hunting around for a device that’s still compatible with the old media.
 
I started testing CFast cards about 1 1/2 years ago. Just testing some cheap ones and a few “good” ones. Also, I do update archival formats every 10 years not because the drives or the discs are are old but because I want to be able to retrieve the data without hunting around for a device that’s still compatible with the old media.
Ah, ok. At over a dollar per gigabyte, and small maximum sizes, I guess this isn't an option for me.
 
On my two 27" iMacs, I backup to external 2.5" HDD's or SSD's. Carbon Copy Cloner was my go-to backup solution for years until Big Sur. Now, back to using Time Machine.
 
I started testing CFast cards about 1 1/2 years ago. Just testing some cheap ones and a few “good” ones. Also, I do update archival formats every 10 years not because the drives or the discs are are old but because I want to be able to retrieve the data without hunting around for a device that’s still compatible with the old media.
Curious, what's the appeal of the CFast card? They seem to be very expensive!
 
Since giving up my TimeCapsule a few years ago, I just use a fast Sandisk USB-C 1TB SSD I got from Costco to back it up once a week, and before every big OS update. I set a reminder on my iPhone to do it every Saturday. Otherwise, between Apple iCloud Drive and MS OneDrive all of my important data is backed up at least twice. The Time Machine is basically for a catastrophic failure or restoring to a new laptop.
 
I have a Seagate slim USB drive (no external power required) attached to my desktop iMac and use Time Machine (and TimeMachineEditor) for desktop backups. It's interesting, in the 15 years that I've own Mac-based computers, I've never had to refer to files on my TM backup. (but I know that the day after I were to stop using it, I'd have a vital need for it :p )

On my second iMac that serves as a Plex server, I have an 8TB external drive as the primary media drive. I have two additional 8TB drives that serve as backups to that primary drive, which I perform periodic backups in an alternating fashion using the "Sync Folders" app.
 
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Curious, what's the appeal of the CFast card? They seem to be very expensive!
They’re expensive but like all storage they will get less expensive. How much less will determine whether or not they’re good for archival. The prospect of an archival format that is fast and stable over time is what intrigues me. Like I said, I’m just testing them. Right now I use hard drives, optical discs and flash “drives” for archival.
 
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I just do manual multiple back ups of my docs and work. Don't care for Time Machine, etc. It's neat but not for me. I don't need to rewind any documents or system. Never needed to.
 
They’re expensive but like all storage they will get less expensive. How much less will determine whether or not they’re good for archival. The prospect of an archival format that is fast and stable over time is what intrigues me. Like I said, I’m just testing them. Right now I use hard drives, optical discs and flash “drives” for archival.
True archival stability is so hard to come by. I just keep moving my stuff forward through SSDs and platter-based hard drives and hoping redundancy works in my favor. If there was something out there I could afford that gave me a high degree of certainty my data would be readable in a couple decades, I'd be very inclined to make an occasional snapshot of all my important data to that medium.
 
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