Carbon Copy Cloner Health Check backups of OWC Thunderbay Mini crash Finder?

[Fallinangel]

Hi,

I'm having issues with my current hardware setup and Carbon Copy Cloner "Health Check" backups.

The weekly backup of my RAID array to a mechanical hard-drive that I perform every 6 months with "Find and Replace Corrupted Filed" option checked in Carbon Copy Cloner, is scheduled to take around 9 hours for about 6TBs of data.
However, the RAID crashes before it can finish after only 6 to 8 hours. It locks up, crashes Finder (if I select anything related to it in Finder), and the Mac Studio needs a hard reboot.
I've had this problem before and it always takes 3 to 4 tries to get a golden backup, which is super annoying, because the backup process drags on for days!

I have my Mac Studio M1 permanently connected to a OWC Thunderbay Mini (with the provided OWC Thunderbolt cable), which currently houses two 3.5" Samsung 870 EVOs. Both SSDs make up a software RAID that was created in macOS some time ago. It's still partioned as Mac OS Extended (Journaled), not APFS. I don't use the OWC software.

The RAID array hosts my macOS backup (in a sparsebundle, I know, I know) and lots of different media and files that are dear to me.
The mechanical 16TB hard-drive (i.e. 16TB) only gets connected when the RAID needs backing up. It's terribly loud. It's connected to the Mac Studio with a USB Type-B (3.0) to USB-C cable. It's partitioned as encrypted APFS. The RAID array gets simply mirrored over, there is no sparsebundle or other trickery.
All of the USB-C ports on my Mac Studio are Thunderbolt 4. The Thunderbay has 2 Thunderbolt 3 ports.

I've checked the OWC website and they don't seem to provide any firmware updates.
Carbon Copy Cloner also isn't very helpful, since when the RAID array freezes, it simply keeps on chirping on and on. It doesn't output any useful information.
The cables seem fine, since they work great for daily use, as does the RAID array. The daily macOS backups to it work like a charm.
The weekly backup without health check of the RAID array to the mechanical hard-drive also works fine.
I've monitored the temperatures of the Samsung SSDs during my last attempt and they seem to do great. They're ranging from 30° to 35°C (i.e. 86° to 95°F) during the backup, which seems very normal.

Has anybody experienced something similar?

Thanks for taking a look.

 

[Fishrrman]

OP wrote:
"Find and Replace Corrupted Filed" option checked in Carbon Copy Cloner ...

Question:
What happens if you UNCHECK this option?
I'd try that at least once, and see if it makes a difference.

 

[Fallinangel]

What happens if you UNCHECK this option?
I'd try that at least once, and see if it makes a difference.

That how I run the same backup task every week, and it works fine. I just do the file health check every six months.

 

[Fishrrman]

"That how I run the same backup task every week, and it works fine. I just do the file health check every six months."

Has the "file health check" ever actually FOUND anything?

I believe that during a normal backup, CCC will let you know if it encounters a bad or corrupted file...

 

[Fallinangel]

Not this time. Half a year ago, it found 3 corrupted music files during a health check run that I then replaced.
I don't think that Carbon Copy Cloner can identify corrupted files during a normal run though.

I think it probably is a hardware or kernel issue? Either the OWC Thunderbay Mini can't sustain the load over hours or there's something in macOS that messes with the backup process. I've already disabled Spotlight indexing for the RAID array since that always used to interfere with long backups and crash Finder.

Anyway, I'm fed up with this. I'm probably skipping the "Find and Replace Corrupted Files" backup in the future.
I've already implemented a script that can check sound files for corruption.

 

[Fishrrman]

"I don't think that Carbon Copy Cloner can identify corrupted files during a normal run though."

YES IT CAN.

Example:
If you tried to copy a whole bunch of files using the finder, and if one of the files was corrupted, the finder will abort the entire job, and NOTHING will be copied.

However:
With CCC if you copy a bunch of files, and if one or more files is corrupted, CCC will not "quit" the copy. Instead, it will skip over the bad files and "keep going" until the job is done. When the job IS done, CCC will present you with a list of files that were skipped (presumably because there's something wrong with them).

As you also mentioned above, you'll probably do fine to just skip the "find and replace" option.

 

[Fallinangel]

YES IT CAN.

Thanks, that's good to know.

I think I'm pretty sure by now that CCC isn't the issue. I've run an rclone dryrun with MD5 checksum checking enabled with the same result. After a couple of hours (i.e. 6), the OWC RAID array crashed.
It must be an issue with the OWC enclosure or macOS. Either way, I'm at my wits end with this.

 

[Fishrrman]

As I mentioned above:
Just skip the "Find and Replace Corrupted Files" option, and keep using CCC.

Get on with life and stop worrying about it.

Alternative:
Ditch the concept of RAID or multiple drives.

Get at least two or three 10tb (or so) drives.
Let one be your "primary external storage".

Use the other two as cloned backups.

 

[Fallinangel]

Just skip the "Find and Replace Corrupted Files" option, and keep using CCC.

I will. As I've mentioned above, CCC doesn't seem to be the culprit.

Ditch the concept of RAID or multiple drives.

I also thought about that and it would even be feasible storage capacity-wise, but the data transfer speed would become halved. As it currently is Music, formerly iTunes, does already struggle slightly with the library size.
And I use the RAID as scratch disk for other applications, too.