I need recommendations for an external hard drive for time machine backups. It’s for a new 2021 MacBook Pro with 8 TB of storage.
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Buying Advice: Need External Hard Drive
- Thread starter MacConvert2007
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If your using Time Machine look a DAS disk larger than your internal space! Time Machine works the best with DAS disks!
Disk Attached Storage
which is what your post implies you will be using.
Things to consider:
1. Time Machine can only be 1 disk in the recommended 3-2-1 backup strategy. Since TM tends to fail make sure you have some clones, such as those created by Carbon Copy Cloner.
2. The disk needs to be larger than the drive to be backed up so that you can maintain version history. Assuming you fill your 8 TB boot drive a minimum drive size would be 10 TB or greater.
3. SSD's not generally recommended for TM due to their cost, although there are exceptions. You don't need their speed as after the first backup backups are incremental and much faster. Their reliability can be about the same as hard disks.
4. A single enclosure thunderbolt drive with easily exchangeable disks might work, but would be a hassle. A 2 bay with easily exchangeable disks would allow you to maintain both TM and clone backups and would allow you to remove them as necessary for off-site backups. Using a single enclosure for both backup types does present some risks if the enclosure fails and corrupts both disks. A USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 (USB standards are very confusing) enclosure would also work although it would be slightly slower, 20 Gbps vs 40 for thunderbolt.
You can either buy a NAS (these are expensive) or a dedicated external hard drive. The NAS will have redundancy over the external.
I have a box with two HDD's inside set to RAID1 and a separate box with one HDD inside. All are 4TB drives which are big enough for my use case.
I chose Western Digital Red NAS drives. They are only used for backup and occasional retrieval but I wanted robust drives that would last. The two in the RAID box date back to 2016 and although they perform just fine with no bad sector issues I will replace them this year.
I chose Western Digital Red NAS drives. They are only used for backup and occasional retrieval but I wanted robust drives that would last. The two in the RAID box date back to 2016 and although they perform just fine with no bad sector issues I will replace them this year.
It's a good point that I believe happened to me recently. An old IcyBox FW possibly corrupted a very old SSD, also a newer HDD. Both drives initially struggling to mount, not ejecting and eventually the OS unresponsive requiring hard shutdown. Enclosure uses the Oxford chipset but is quite old, did not occur to me that this can cause drive corruption also. Interesting.
I might also suggest a SSD or HDD for a CCC (Carbon Copy Cloner; which I use) or other Software cloner for an portable and/or off site copy. Depends upon the importance of the data of course. Plenty of info on these forums concerning CCC and other software.