If the unexpected happens, you want to get back to work as quickly as possible with all of your data. Here is an elegant solution to backup you Mac and the pros and cons of Carbon Copy Cloner Vs Time Machine backups.
My Backup and Restoration Experiences
I have been an avid Apple user for over a decade. Between my wife and I, we have had over a dozen Macs. I have gone through the pain of a fail graphics card on both an iMac and a MacBook Pro. Neither of these issues were hard drive failures but both preventing my Mac from booting. So I was so happy that I had a backup of all our stuff. I have also upgraded to a new mac multiple times and wanted to have all of my data ready to go as quickly as possible.
How I Back My Computers Up and Why
Recommend abandoning Time Machine and use Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper! Use DropBox for critical files and a weekly clone schedule instead of contemporaneous Time Machine intrusions. Time Machine had more relevance during the age of spinners. SSDs generally are more robust and require less maintenance. Clone your Mac with Carbon Copy Cloner (Paid) Here is another software utility that lets you create bootable disk images of your Mac’s hard drive. It works with all version of the macOS and will cost you $39.99 for a fully licensed version. Method 3: Back up Your Mac to an Online Backup Service. Backup your Mac with Time Machine. There are many reasons that may have influenced your.
- Acronis has been a stable backup and cloning solution for Windows. I don't know how they deal with macOS but apps like Carbon Copy Cloner and SuperDuper are hard to beat. As for ARQ backup, keep in mind how long it takes to transmit your data to the cloud and even worse, how long it would take to recover it.
- I clone my Macinosh HD using Carbon Copy Cloner. I update the clone regularly, but not cintinuously. If my HDD fails, and I restore a new HDD using the latest clone, the Dropbox folder will not be current. I assume Dropbox will recognize the cloned folder and older files, as just that, older,.
There are a lot of ways to reach the backup solution that you want. I use a combination of backup methods and they are relatively transparent on a daily basis and best of all the software is free. My primary backup method is a Time Machine backup on a Synology NAS 412+. This Network Attached Storage (NAS) is used to back up an iMac, a MacBook, and a MacBook Pro all over ethernet or wifi automatically. Additionally, the NAS is not only used for backup it also hosts my Plex Media Server. I occasionally make backups using Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper, usually using a free trial, or software that came with a hard drive purchase. The most common times I do a clone is when I am upgrading a hard drive or upgrading my whole computer.
You Should Ensure Your Backup is Backed-up
A down fall of backing up to a single drive is that drive could also fail. We have 4, 4TB hard drives setup using Synology Hybrid Raid (SHR). Which gives me a total of 12 TB of usable space with single hard drive failure redundancy. Now, this is not total backup protection, since it will not prevent loss from things like fire or theft. If you want an internet based backup method you are going to have to pay a subscription for it. Some good internet-based options are iCloud Drive, Google Drive, Dropbox, and Backblaze. Now, most of these services have free options, but none of which provide enough storage to backup most peoples computers.
Backup the Most Important Things Online
You can back up the most important things online for free, at least I can back up my most important things. If my house was destroyed in a fire, the most important things that I would want back off my computer are my memories. The pictures of my family are the most important thing on my computers. Everything else is just not that important. Fortunately, Google Drive will let you backup all your photos for free with no limit in “High quality”.
What the Difference Between High Quality and Original Quality For Google Drive?
You may be wondering why I said “High Quality”. Because Google Drive backs up your photos with two options “High Quality” or “Original Quality”. If you select “High Quality” Google will backup all your photos and they won’t count towards your 15GB, the curent free storage limit. If you choose “Original Quality” every photo will count towards your 15GB free limit. Here is the answer from Google on what happens if you select “High Quality” storage for unlimited storage.
- Photos are compressed to save space. If a photo is larger than 16MP, it will be resized to 16MP.
- You can print good quality 16MP photos in sizes up to 24 inches x 16 inches.
- Videos higher than 1080p will be resized to high-definition 1080p. A video with 1080p or less will look close to the original. Some information, like closed captions, might be lost.
I think this unlimited picture storage is great, most of my photos are already under 16MP and most of my videos are under 1080p. So for the things that really matter, I can have a free cloud backup with unlimited storage. If they can’t convert the photo or video then it will count towards your data usage.
This is an Error I got for a few photos that couldn’t be reduced by Google Drive.
Carbon Copy Cloner vs Time Machine Benefits
The Main Benefits of Carbon Copy Cloner
You Have a Bootable Clone
This is the most advantageous benefit for Carbon Copy Cloner vs Time Machine. If your original hard drive fails, your computer is stolen or damaged. You can plug your CCC backup into a computer and boot from it and it has all the information from the last backup.
The Backups are Fast
Well fast is a relative term, but CCC backup is touted to be faster than Time Machine and SuperDuper. The speed of your backup depends a lot on the hardware that you are using as well.
Very Customizable
Instead of ease of use, you get options galore. You may find this very handy that you can customize the backups to meet your needs.
Find and Repair Corrupt Data
CCC can check your backup drives health. Drive health is an advanced option and you must turn it on. This will add additional processing overhead, but will help ensure the health of your backup.
The Main Benefits of Using Time Machine
You Already Have Time Machine
Having a Time Machine backup can be very convenient, it is the easiest backup system to use on a Mac. It is built in very elegantly into Mac OS. For this reason, once Time Machine is running if you deleted something that you need to recover you can easily get it back with Time Machine. I have probably used this feature more than any other feature of Time Machine. Additionally, if you change a file and you want to get back the original file, you can do that as well.
This is what it looks like to “Enter Time Machine”
You Only Need One Additional Thing – A Drive
The only extra thing you need to get your Time Machine backup going is an external hard drive or cloud storage, the same as you need for any other backup system.
Time Machine Does all the Work – Set it Up and Forget It
Once you plug a drive into your Mac and go to format it, you will be prompt you to use the drive as a Time Machine volume. After you click yes, you are done with setup and your Mac will regularly back itself up to that drive. If you disconnect the drive, Time Machine will prompt you to connect the drive occasionally.
Create Multiple Backup Seamlessly
Your ease for setting up one backup is just as easy to set up two or more. Every time you format a new hard drive, the first thing you mac will ask is if you want to use it as a Time Machine backup.
Easy Encryptions
So you want your backups to be encrypted, Great! With Time Machine all you have to do is check the box Encrypt Backups when you setup Time Machine.
Carbon Copy Cloner vs Time Machine Drawbacks
The Main Drawbacks of Carbon Copy Cloner
Does Not Integrate with the Cloud
Now you may be able to create a volume with CCC that you can store on the cloud, but this is not a beginner process. Additionally it removes the primary benefit of having a ready to go bootable backup at your fingertips.
Does Not Create Encrypted Backups
CCC doesn’t in itself create encrypted backups, even if the drive that you are backing up is encrypted. There are work arounds, essentially, you will get your Mac’s built in File Vault to encrypt the drive and handle the encryptions. Making the drive encrypted takes a few additional steps and is not a beginner process you can find it here.
The Main Drawbacks of Time Machine
Hard to Customize
You have far fewer options to customize your backup method. There are third-party applications that can solve many of your desires for this. TimeMachineEditor is one third party application that allows you to change the backup interval and when Time Machine runs.
Slow Backups
The reason you may want to change your backup intervals is that backups are slow. Additionally, you may not want to waste time running Time Machine every hour while you are sleeping.
No Drive Health
Many of the cloning methods have system checks that are performed routinely on the drives that hold the backups. This is not the case with Time Machine. Though if you are using a NAS, which should have its own health checks or the cloud you won’t have to worry about this.
Not a Bootable Clone
Your Time Machine Backups are not bootable. Meaning you can’t just plug it in and use it as your primary computer drive. Instead to recover your backup or set up all your stuff on a new computer you have to use Migration Assistant.
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Over 200GB had disappeared from my Mac’s startup volume. It seemed unlikely the external SSD I had just swapped in as my startup drive was shrinking. Instead, it was a snapshot—more accurately, a snapshot for reverting the state of files on my volume or the entire volume to a previous point in time.
Snapshots are a powerful way for backup software to provide a quick point in time to walk back to when you don’t necessarily need to restore the entire volume. You might want an earlier version of a file, or the volume might be changed only slightly, making it far faster to use a snapshot to revert it to a previous state. That might happen if you accidentally overwrite a bunch of files or (heaven forbid) you were attacked by ransomware. (Ransomware is a potential risk for Mac users, because of the simple nature of how it works, but there have been no meaningful ransomware malware “successes” against macOS yet.)
You might encounter snapshots seemingly filling your startup volume from one of two pieces of software:
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- Time Machine: Time Machine writes temporary snapshots to the local volume in preparation of copying them to a local or network volume that’s not immediately available. This can result in orphaned snapshots. You can use the advice in this column from 2018 which describes how to determine whether these snapshots are in place and offers instructions on deleting them. A Time Machine backup volume also has snapshots that let you revert files or a volume to a particular moment, but those don’t occupy space on your startup volume.
- Carbon Copy Cloner: Bombich Software’s backup software automatically creates snapshots using a feature in the APFS filesystem when your startup volume is an SSD. Apple started rolling out APFS a few releases of macOS ago. For details on working with CCC’s use of APFS snapshots, read on.
Carbon Copy Cloner and snapshots
APFS allows the creation of a snapshot as a sort of “fast rewind.” Instead of restoring everything on your volume, if you restore from an APFS snapshot, only the changes between the current state of your volume and the state of the snapshot need be applied. The volume rewinds in time to that point.
You can also use the feature to retrieve older versions of a file from the snapshot. Storing snapshots of files is called versioning, and it’s available through Time Machine if that backup method is enabled; through apps that support the File > Revert To > Browse All Versions feature, described in this column, which makes a new version for each save and for some auto-save operations; and via sync software like Dropbox, which requires a trip to the website to pull up previous versions.
Carbon Copy Cloner Trial
Bombich Software recommends snapshots as part of a set of backup methods that can help you get back in action more quickly, and enables the feature by default and only for SSDs. I had just switched from an internal Fusion drive (a tiny SSD plus a large hard disk drive) to an external SSD, which is why I encountered the problem suddenly. Kies application bnr.
But if you’re using Time Machine and Dropbox or some other combination of software that keeps revisions on hand, you don’t need these snapshots or can set it to a low number.
In Carbon Copy Cloner > Preferences, uncheck “Enable snapshots on APFS-formatted, SSD-backed volumes.” After disabling, however, you can select a volume in the sidebar under Volumes and see a list of snapshots and settings to enable or disable snapshots.
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If you’re finding the snapshots are filling your volume too full, as I was, set the free space remaining settings (the bottom of the five settings) to a higher number, like 150GB or 200GB. You can also reduce the number of snapshots made and how long they’re retained.
This Mac 911 article is in response to a question submitted by Macworld reader Nick.
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