I have multiple layers of backups already; that is why I don’t see the utility of using Backblaze. Appreciate the discussion about it though.
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Best backup solution for M1 MACs?
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I have an 8TB Samsung SSD attached to my Mac for constant Time Machine backups and a remote backup with Backblaze. When I used to commute to an office I also kept a drive at the office that I'd update every two weeks or so.
You really should have an offsite backup, but many don't. And if you're going to be doing just one onsite back up, I'd recommend against Time Machine. Time Machine is probably the best solution available for versioning. But with that versioning feature comes additional complexity, and with additional complexity comes a higher chance of failure. Thus, for a single backup solution, I would recommend Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) because it's simpler and more straightforward – – it just makes a straight backup of your data, and you can program it to repeat the backup at whatever interval you please. It also has features that allow it to confirm the backup is done correctly, and to check the backup for file corruption. [I have CCC set to "re-verify files that were copied" each time it runs, and to "find and replace corrupted files" once per month.]
Now of course, you don't want to have just a single backup. I thus have both a 2 TB SSD and a 4 TB SSD (both are Kingston XS2000's) attached continously to my iMac. The 2 TB SSD contains a CCC backup that is refreshed nightly. The 4 TB SSD contains a Time Machine backup. This gives me both a maximally reliable onsite backup, and a backup with versioning. And they're on separate drives, so if one drive fails I have the other. [Though if you want to save $, you can buy a single large HDD and partition it into a CCC volume and a Time Machine volume.] In addition, I have a pair of cheap portable 2 TB HDDs (Seagate), with CCC backups, that I swap out, as needed, to a safe remote location (I use a safety deposit box).
Now of course, you don't want to have just a single backup. I thus have both a 2 TB SSD and a 4 TB SSD (both are Kingston XS2000's) attached continously to my iMac. The 2 TB SSD contains a CCC backup that is refreshed nightly. The 4 TB SSD contains a Time Machine backup. This gives me both a maximally reliable onsite backup, and a backup with versioning. And they're on separate drives, so if one drive fails I have the other. [Though if you want to save $, you can buy a single large HDD and partition it into a CCC volume and a Time Machine volume.] In addition, I have a pair of cheap portable 2 TB HDDs (Seagate), with CCC backups, that I swap out, as needed, to a safe remote location (I use a safety deposit box).
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If you have a sinology NAS then the solution is dead easy. Make a shared folder for each Mac you own and place a quota on it about 2X larger then the physical drive in the Mac. Then on the Mac choose that star as the Time machine folder. Then the Mac will backup tot he Sinology every hours. The first backup might take a while then it will go fast.
Then, I assume you have a system to backup the Synology NAS. Ad these new shared folders to that system.
Yes, you want each Mac on its own shared folder so one Mac does not "hog" all the space. Time machine will fill the entire folder quota and then start deleting the oldest backup.
If the shared folder is larger then the Mac's disk you can hold a lot if historic data.
Later you can restore a Mac no just to the saved state, but to any state in the past. Set it back two hours or two months or whatever.
Time Machine backup can work if you buy a new Mac. To move your files.
Not backing up the Sinology? That's nuts. It needs an off site backup.
Can't make a bootable disk but you NEVER need to. After a afresh copy of macOS is installed it will ask you "where is the Time Machine data" you just point it to Sinology and the computer is back to the state is was at any point in time you prefer.
You must be an old, Windows user from thedayswhen disks were not soldered to main logic boards.
Carbon copy is the worst. Here is the common scenario. You just spent a month writing a paper. You clone the drive. Then the next day the file is corrupted but you don't notice. Then you clone the drive again and destroy the only good copy of your paper.
Yes CCC is conceptually simple but unless you have 20 physical disk then you rotate CCC is a danger to your data.
NEVER overwrite your only good backup with another backup. If you want to clone a disk, buy at least five physical drives
TM only over write old data if there is no space, then it deletsthe oldest copy of the data and leaves many goodcopies
Another really good idea is the Synology BRTFS. It makes a daily snapshot of the entire system. But with BRTFS a snapshot takes only seconds and zero space on the drive. So that are "free". The BRTFS uses "Copy on Write" and is very much like Apple's APFS
You're not using CCC correctly. You can restore older versions of files using its Safety Net, so if you have that issue, it means you've deliberately turned Safety Net off, since it is on by default.
Further, for even easier restoration of older files, if you're using APFS, you can enable APFS Snapshots. I don't bother with the latter, because I also have Time Machine.
You don’t really need to back up the NAS if you don’t care much about preserving historical data. The chance that both the NAS and your computer fails if fairly low after all. Not to mention that backing up the NAS can be quite expensive in itself.
By the way, Synology now offers cloud Time Machine via their C2 backup. Very reasonably priced too. I’m actually tempted.
Umm.. you can do even better than that. Synology has a built-in tool called HyperBackup, which is a Time Machine-like variant for the NAS. You can use that to take a full backup of the NAS, and store that somewhere.
Neither Time Machine nor HyperBackup are just for versioning, however. You can take a full level 0 backup of each one of those, and store that. The issue comes up when you have the differentials between that last full backup and what is currently on the Mac (or NAS). Those differences would be gone when a disaster occurs, and you'd be stuck returning to the last known state from those backups. That is where the versioning comes in, or in better sense, incrementals. Here's what happens.
Level 0 = full backup.
Level 1 = Incremental backup relative to the level 0.
Level 2 = incremental backup relative to the level 1.
Level 3 = incremental backup relative to the level 2.
Level 4 = incremental backup relative to the level 3.
And on and on and on.
If you ran Time Machine to back up your Mac every day for 5 days, your result would be a level 0, plus every incremental going down that chain to the level 4 backup that was taken which is relative to the data from the previous backup before that. On day 6, you have a disaster, and need to restore from scratch. You lay down MacOS, and restore from the TM backup via Migration Assistant. Migration Assistant brings in the data from the level 0, then supplements with all of the changes going down to the final incremental backup taken from that level 5 backup.
The same applies to HyperBackup on your NAS.
The cost for this would only be an external drive (if you are backing up via TM to that device), or the NAS. I personally have had a Synology DS213j for the past 9 years. It has 2 3TB SATA HDDs in it, in RAID 1. I was backing up my mid-2011 MBA to an external drive (WiFi speeds to back up a drive to a NAS is horrible, plus latency), but now on my M1 Pro MBP, I'm backing up both to an external SSD as well as my NAS over Gigabit Ethernet. I then back up my NAS via HyperBackup to another external SSD. My TM backup stays with me onsite, while my NAS backup goes offsite (no one takes into account that your residence is a single point of failure, and if you lose that you could lose all the data you have at your residence).
The Both my TM external disk and NAS external disk are 5TB USB SSDs, which only set me back $98 each, from Costco when they are on sale. One would spend that much over the course of 5 months for an online solution.
But to say that TM doesn't do straight backups is wrong; to say that Synology's backup solution doesn't handle full backups is even more wrong.
BL.
I have to stick up for Time Machine a little bit here, because I have used Backblaze and Time Machine in tandem before and I don't find them useful for the same reasons.
Time Machine has literally saved me from getting in big trouble at work, and it was back in the bad old days of Time Machine where it would always forget what drive it was supposed to back up to, or it would treat it like a brand new drive and start it all over again every other day. But it did allow me to restore a work machine back to an older version of macOS after I missed the memo that an application I needed wasn't compatible. The IT people at that job were not pleasant people and would have been pretty angry with me. Time Machine made it like it never happened. I also used it for the first time ever recently to restore my new MacBook Pro from a backup of my MacBook Air and it worked flawlessly. I really think this feature has improved and am comfortable using it as my main local backup now.
But another feature that's greatly improved (at least in my experience) over the years is iCloud Drive. I keep all my personal files in iCloud Drive and all my work files in my OneDrive account. Both of those are good enough offsite backups for me and one of them I even pay for, so I just don't see the need for something like Backblaze anymore.
I can't speak to iCloud or Backblaze, but as far as TM goes, everything you've said here is consistent with my own view. As I mentioned, TM is great for versioning. And I didn't mean to give the impression that TM is unreliable. What I was trying to say is that, while TM's reliability is decent, I've found that TM occasionally got corrupted, while CCC never did. And I attribute that to TM's added complexity.
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And not being 5 Nines is something I would disagree with as well, in regards to CCC. If you're accounting for full 5 nines, you're still needing to resolve the issue for your internal drive crashing for you to revert to using a clone of the OS. You're still encountering more downtime than what the 5 nines calls for.
Now, regarding Time Machine, when I tried to upgrade to a standalone version 1Password 7 after AgileBits shut down their license provisioning servers, I also found out that I could not get back to 1Password 6 successfully, because the 1Password 7 process left my vault in read-only mode, and without that functionality, I was basically crippled because I couldn't add any more passwords or info to my vault.
At that point, I was at what would call a disaster. Time Machine to the Rescue.
I blew away my Mac completely, reinstalled MacOS Sierra on my Mac, and used Time Machine via Migration Assistant to get back to exactly the time I was at prior to attempting the 1Password 7 upgrade. That time only set me back 45 minutes.
Now, My Mac was still fully functional, but 1Password 6 was not. Was it overkill to go all the way back to to a clean reinstall? yes. However, a simple restore of the 1Password 6 application didn't resolve the issue either. So I went with a full vanilla install and then lay down everything I had from the TM backup. TM's complexity knew what to do without leaving more of what needs to be done to get the Mac back to full functionality up to the user.
BL.
It is important to mention that TM was completely re-engineered very recently and now relies on APFS snapshots instead the old file copy+link method. The new implementation is much faster and more reliable than the old Time Ms hind which indeed had some reliability issues.
Yep--exactly. It was a disaster sometimes on my old Western Digital external drive on my Intel Mac mini. With M1 Pro and my Sandisk drive, the backups are fast and reliable and made my transfer from M1 Air to M1 Pro a breeze.
For sure--Time Machine is completely hands off unless you need it. I just think as my storage needs have evolved over time, my needs for a 1:1 backup like that have gotten pretty close to zero. For example, back in 2007 when my first child was born, I was still using a digital tape camcorder to create, edit, store, etc. all my video. That took up a lot of local storage, and I never liked having just one copy of those important videos, so I liked using Backblaze as an offsite backup. But obviously these days, I record those moments from my iPhone and they go right to the cloud. I could throw my phone in the river, go buy a new one, restore from the latest backup, and I'm good.
You took my "5 nines" statement literally, when it clearly wasn't intended as such. That's why I explicitly put it in quotes, to indicate I was using it as an expression to indicate extremely high reliability. But since this apparently leads to misunderstanding, I've edited my post to make this clearer. Here's the new version:
"What I was trying to say is that, while TM's reliability is decent, I've found that TM occasionally got corrupted (e.g., I would lose access to a broad date range—a few months of backups—and I'm not referring to purning, which drops the oldest backups), while CCC never did. And I attribute that to TM's added complexity."
I also have no idea what you mean by "resolve the issue for your internal drive crashing". You're inferring something that was never there, since I never mentioned internal drives crashing.
The last time I had an internal drive crash was an HDD in a PowerMac G5 in ~2007, and it wasn't an issue because I replaced it with a new drive, and then cloned my CCC backup to it. The way I've used CCC since then is for instances when I've made an update to my system (either a new app or an OS update) that creates problems. So I'll just save any new files I've created that day to a USB stick, and restore my system from the CCC clone, which returns it to the state it had the day before (since I do nightly backups). I've not had to do this since I switched from my 2014 MBP to my 2019 iMac.
And nothing you wrote about TM contradicts what I said. The fact that TM usually works (which is all your experience indicates) doesn't mean it always works.
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That's good news that they've improved its reliability. But I remain unconvinced that its reliability is high enough to rely on as my primary backup.
For instance, I switched to using an SSD for my TM backups on Oct. 1, which means I started a fresh TM backup then. When I did my initial check after a couple of weeks, I could see the first few weeks of backups. But when I checked again in the third week of Oct., I could see the first couple of weeks of backups in the sidebar, but couldn't access them (I could only access the most recent week). So I did First Aid on my main drive, and couldn't repair it, even from Recovery. Thus I did an OS Restore, after which I was able to do First Aid on my main drive without issue, and access my TM backups again. Meanwhile, my CCC backup was unaffected by all of this. This is why I continue to view CCC as more robust.
At the same time, I love TM's versioning capability, and its UI for checking older versions is outstanding. That's why I use both TM and CCC (on separate external SSDs).
The problem with TM is that if the backup volume is a local drive, it will format it to APFS and then you cannot copy the TM backup to another drive. So I use a 2014 mac as a server and connect it up to my main mac via thunderbolt network. The server runs time machone with a disk formatted as apple extended. Using thunderbolt network provides 2.5Gbps transfer rate, or around 300MB/sec. This is faster than most spinning drives, so this method is just as fast as using a local disk. After a few years, I simply buy more storage and copy the TM backup using Superduper to the new drive. One day Apple may allow copying TM backups, but until then, this works pretty well. I use the server for other reasons as well.
I've noticed that as well (though I don't know if it's specific to APFS): I had 3 TB worth of TM data on an HDD that I wanted to prune manually (keeping the oldest stuff, and reducing the size to ~1.5 TB by increasing the intervals between versions), and then copy onto a new 4 TB SSD, then continue my TM backup to add to to that. The manual pruning is difficult, and copying a TM backup to a new drive and continuing from there seems impossible—Apple's only advice for when you fill a TM backup is to put it into storage and start fresh, which makes it inconvenient if you need to access old data.
The number two cause of data loss is not a hard drive failure, but loss of the equipment. Theft or a house fire or lightening striking the power line a block from you. If any of this happens, you lose EVERYTHING all at the same time.
Ok, so maybe all you have is some downloaded videos from Youtube and old emails. But maybe there is data your business depends on.
It is easy to backup a Synolgy NAS. There are at least three cloud services that are easy to use (I think Backblaze B2 is the cheapest and it seems that Synology's own C2 would be the simplest to use) But you can also buy a second Synology NAS and place it in a different building. Perhaps one in your office and another at home and back each one up to the other.
Where I used to work, we had three File servers in three different cities and they all kept synchronized and they all had a versioned files system that would not allow deletes of old data. So it was relatively bombproof.
And do not forget the NUMBER ONE cause of data loss, operator error. For that you need versioning and a backup system that prevents you from overwriting good copies with corrupted copies of the data. Key word is is "prevents yu from" So you can't screw up even if you are drunk.