Catastrophic M1 Studio collapse: does a silicon mac reboot exist?

[Robbo99]

Thanks for previous discussions concerning the uncertainties of using Super Duper or Carbon Copy to create rebootable disks of the operating system and programs.

My M1 Mac Studio light started flashing orange, requiring the SSD and logic board to be replaced. The Mac was returned with Ventura installed. Dat on external HD's fine but the operating system and numerous programs etc completely gone.

I keep data on external HD's and would like to back up the MAC to allow me to reinstall all programs etc if it collapses again.

I head about 'built in' rebootable disks within Mac Studio making some backups redundant, but this would not work if the disk itself fails.
Currently using Backblaze and TimeMachine for backups but TM also seems to have fallen over.

What is the best practice for rebuilding a Mac Studio if the HD is replaced or fails? Ideally something like SuperDuper but there seems to be problems with its application to Mac silicon. There has to be somethiung better than dies of reinstalling software?

Any advise greatly appreciated,
thanks
simon

 

[BrianBaughn]

What does "TM also seems to have fallen over" mean?

 

[Robbo99]

Found the following article very useful . . .

Creating legacy bootable copies of macOS (Big Sur and later) | Bombich Software

bombich.com

What does "TM also seems to have fallen over" mean?

It means that TM seems to have taken a snap shot on the day I reconnected it to the new machine, and lost all of the previous backups.

 

[davidlv]

Found the following article very useful . . .

Creating legacy bootable copies of macOS (Big Sur and later) | Bombich Software

bombich.com

It means that TM seems to have taken a snap shot on the day I reconnected it to the new machine, and lost all of the previous backups.

The OP should read that blog at the Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) HP, it is indeed enlightening.
I have found that having a CCC backup on an external SSD makes it super easy to get back up and running. Just install the new system (if necessary) and run the Migration Assistant, pointing it to the CCC backup.
CCC itself is easy to set up. It has a one month free use trial period, but I seriously think it is well worth the reasonable price. It has saved me serious trouble several times! (no connection to the company, just a satisfied customer)

 

[Robbo99]

The OP should read that blog at the Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) HP, it is indeed enlightening.
I have found that having a CCC backup on an external SSD makes it super easy to get back up and running. Just in stall the new system (if necessary) and run the Migration Assistant, pointing it to the CCC backup.
CCC itself is easy to set up. It has a one month free use trial period, but I seriously think it is well worth the reasonable price. It has saved me serious trouble several times! (no connection to the company, just a satisfied customer)

Thanks davidlv for the feedback indicating that Carbon Copy + Migration Assistance has worked for you. I have gone the Carbon Copy route (with the incremental backup) and hopefully wont have to ever use it . . cheers, Simon

 

[davidlv]

Thanks davidlv for the feedback indicating that Carbon Copy + Migration Assistance has worked for you. I have gone the Carbon Copy route (with the incremental backup) and hopefully wont have to ever use it . . cheers, Simon

@simon I am sure you will find CCC to be an essential tool. It certainly has proven to be so for me over the years.
In addition, if you ever have backup-related issues or questions, the folk at Bombich, https://bombich.com/ will respond quickly with expert advice, often from the main programmer and owner of the company, Mike Bombich.
While it would be best if you never have to use that incremental CCC backup, Apple has almost guaranteed that you will at some point, so it is always best to make sure you have a fairly current backup.

 

[cbum]

CCC backup on an external SSD

Why backup to an SSD rather than a large, cheap external HD? Speed isn't an issue, right?

 

[BrianBaughn]

Why backup to an SSD rather than a large, cheap external HD? Speed isn't an issue, right?

It is when you're recovering from the backup.

 

[FreakinEurekan]

It is when you're recovering from the backup.

Hmm, that’s somewhere between one and zero times a decade for me. The extra cost isn’t worth it for the time saved.

 

[davidlv]

Hmm, that’s somewhere between one and zero times a decade for me. The extra cost isn’t worth it for the time saved.

I have 2 Crucial 512GB SATA SSDs in Orico enclosures, total cash outlay less than $120, and each drive is big enough for several OS backups. The speed is less than the usual modern M2 SSD, but more than enough for easy quick backups. If you already have HDD disks in enclosures, by all means use those instead. Unless you are doing video or sound recording, or the like, 512GB is the sweet spot now for SSDs, in terms of size and price at present.

 

[BrianBaughn]

Hmm, that’s somewhere between one and zero times a decade for me. The extra cost isn’t worth it for the time saved.

It's a forward-thinking strategy.

 

[xraydoc]

It means that TM seems to have taken a snap shot on the day I reconnected it to the new machine, and lost all of the previous backups.

That doesn't sound right. Something strange happened then, because Time Machine doesn't erase backups when restoring or reconfiguring. It should just ask to either start a new backup or continue on with current state of backups.

 

[ChrisA]

What is the best practice for rebuilding a Mac Studio if the HD is replaced or fails? Ideally something like SuperDuper but there seems to be problems with its application to Mac silicon. There has to be somethiung better than dies of reinstalling software?

Best practice is to restore from Time Machine. It is trivially simple to do. TM updates every hour, so at most you only lose an hour of work.

If you really care about the data then use two, not one TM disk. One of the "disks" can actualy be space on a remote server.

I have no idea why people use third-party backup software. Maybe the idea of an exact "clone" of the system drive is conceptually easy to understand. It is also easy to see why "make a clone" is a very bad idea. Let's say you have a document you have been working on for a few days. Then it gets damaged. Perhaps by user error or a hardware problem but you don't know it is damaged. There are somehow 10 missing pages now. But it is OK because you made a "clone" of the system drive only a day ago. So far, so good. But now you think "I'd better do a backup." so you do. But in doing so you just overwrote the only good copy of the document with the newer corrupted version.

The better plan is to copy only the changes to the backup disk and keep every old version for as long as possible. This is why people use a 4TB Time Machine disk to backup a 512 GB internal drive. You might be able to keep a year's worth of changes and then go back in time to the point just before those 10 pages got deleted, copy those, and add them back to a newer version of the document.

The "clone" method does work if you have enough hard drives. Every day you place the backup in a fire safe where you store the last 12 or so backups. You would need to buy 12 disk drives and rotate them using some kind of daily and weekly rotation pattern. Years ago this was common in professional settings. We had a walk-in, fireproof data vault adjacent to the computer room.

 

[spiderman0616]

Best practice is to restore from Time Machine. It is trivially simple to do. TM updates every hour, so at most you only lose an hour of work.

If you really care about the data then use two, not one TM disk. One of the "disks" can actualy be space on a remote server.

I have no idea why people use third-party backup software. Maybe the idea of an exact "clone" of the system drive is conceptually easy to understand. It is also easy to see why "make a clone" is a very bad idea. Let's say you have a document you have been working on for a few days. Then it gets damaged. Perhaps by user error or a hardware problem but you don't know it is damaged. There are somehow 10 missing pages now. But it is OK because you made a "clone" of the system drive only a day ago. So far, so good. But now you think "I'd better do a backup." so you do. But in doing so you just overwrote the only good copy of the document with the newer corrupted version.

The better plan is to copy only the changes to the backup disk and keep every old version for as long as possible. This is why people use a 4TB Time Machine disk to backup a 512 GB internal drive. You might be able to keep a year's worth of changes and then go back in time to the point just before those 10 pages got deleted, copy those, and add them back to a newer version of the document.

The "clone" method does work if you have enough hard drives. Every day you place the backup in a fire safe where you store the last 12 or so backups. You would need to buy 12 disk drives and rotate them using some kind of daily and weekly rotation pattern. Years ago this was common in professional settings. We had a walk-in, fireproof data vault adjacent to the computer room.

Agree. Has become every bit as easy as going from iPhone to iPhone.

 

[bobcomer]

Years ago this was common in professional settings. We had a walk-in, fireproof data vault adjacent to the computer room.

Some of IT guys still do.

 

[spiderman0616]

Found the following article very useful . . .

Creating legacy bootable copies of macOS (Big Sur and later) | Bombich Software

bombich.com

It means that TM seems to have taken a snap shot on the day I reconnected it to the new machine, and lost all of the previous backups.

I've had Time Machine do this to me before too a couple of times, but each time it's been because of faulty drives, not software. Sucks either way though. I don't necessarily mind staring it all over since it's a "just in case" anyway, but I do hate losing all that history. Sometimes problems don't creep up until later and maybe I DO want to go a couple weeks back!

I was recently bitten by all the SanDisk issues so this topic still kind of stings a bit.

 

[xraydoc]

Best practice is to restore from Time Machine. It is trivially simple to do. TM updates every hour, so at most you only lose an hour of work.

If you really care about the data then use two, not one TM disk. One of the "disks" can actualy be space on a remote server.

I do this very thing. I've got one backup on a local SSD (2TB Samsung T7 Shield), one backup on a network drive (an old 2TB Time Capsule with its wifi turned off, so it's basically just a slow NAS), and -- I know this isn't reliable -- a flush-mount SD card in the SD slot of my MacBook Pro.

This way, I've got two good backups (the SSD and the Time Capsule), plus at least some kind of a backup when I've got my MacBook away from my desk for the day.

Plus, all the important stuff gets synced to iCloud Drive & iCloud Photos anyway.

 

[FreakinEurekan]

I have 2 Crucial 512GB SATA SSDs in Orico enclosures, total cash outlay less than $120, and each drive is big enough for several OS backups. The speed is less than the usual modern M2 SSD, but more than enough for easy quick backups. If you already have HDD disks in enclosures, by all means use those instead. Unless you are doing video or sound recording, or the like, 512GB is the sweet spot now for SSDs, in terms of size and price at present.

512GB wouldn’t cover my current Photos library, much less things like music, video library, and home movies. My total backup right now is somewhere between 3TB and 4TB… granted, some of that isn’t crucial to keep backed up (movies & music that I could re-download from iTunes Store, for example) but it’s simpler to just back everything up than to fiddle with the minutia of this is important, that isn’t important… I’m running an 8TB backup drive that I paid $146 for FIVE YEARS ago. No idea how cheap they are now.

And, of course, I haven’t NEEDED that backup in 5 years… but it’s still there, still updated daily.

There will come a time when SSD is simply cheap enough that it WILL make sense for backup drives. I’ll check prices when I replace my current drive… my impression is that HDDs are still considerably cheaper at the sizes I’d need but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ maybe.

 

[theorist9]

Best practice is to restore from Time Machine. It is trivially simple to do. TM updates every hour, so at most you only lose an hour of work.

If you really care about the data then use two, not one TM disk. One of the "disks" can actualy be space on a remote server.

I have no idea why people use third-party backup software. Maybe the idea of an exact "clone" of the system drive is conceptually easy to understand. It is also easy to see why "make a clone" is a very bad idea. Let's say you have a document you have been working on for a few days. Then it gets damaged. Perhaps by user error or a hardware problem but you don't know it is damaged. There are somehow 10 missing pages now. But it is OK because you made a "clone" of the system drive only a day ago. So far, so good. But now you think "I'd better do a backup." so you do. But in doing so you just overwrote the only good copy of the document with the newer corrupted version.

The better plan is to copy only the changes to the backup disk and keep every old version for as long as possible. This is why people use a 4TB Time Machine disk to backup a 512 GB internal drive. You might be able to keep a year's worth of changes and then go back in time to the point just before those 10 pages got deleted, copy those, and add them back to a newer version of the document.

The "clone" method does work if you have enough hard drives. Every day you place the backup in a fire safe where you store the last 12 or so backups. You would need to buy 12 disk drives and rotate them using some kind of daily and weekly rotation pattern. Years ago this was common in professional settings. We had a walk-in, fireproof data vault adjacent to the computer room.

I'd like to offer a different view. IMO, the best practice is to use a dedicated 3rd-party product with demonstrated reliabilty, like CCC, for backups, along with TM for versioning.

I think TM is great. It offers excellent functionality for finding earlier versions of files. But along with that functionality comes complexity, and that increased complexity means decreased robustness. Many, including myself, have had repeated experiences with TM backups becoming corrupted and inaccessible, forcing us to wipe the disk and start again from scratch. That's why it's risky to rely on TM for backup.

Thus, instead of using a dedicated versioning product for backup, you should use a dedicated backup product for backup. I've been using CCC for fourteen years, on four different Macs and many different versions of MacOS and, unlike the case with TM, have never had a CCC backup become corrupted. It's far more robust than TM.

You are correct that backups alone won't deal with the kind of problem you mentioned, which is why a versioning system is also important. CCC does offer versioning--you simply turn on APFS snapshots, and it stores those. But CCC isn't a dedicated versioning system like TM (which is good--the fact that it focuses on backups is a key to its reliability), so I'd recommend having a separate TM backup for versioning.

That's what I do: I have a 2 TB external SSD for CCC, and a 4 TB external SSD for TM, and both are continously connected to my iMac. CCC is set to do nightly backups, and TM runs in its default continuous setting.

 

[sunny5]

Thanks for previous discussions concerning the uncertainties of using Super Duper or Carbon Copy to create rebootable disks of the operating system and programs.

My M1 Mac Studio light started flashing orange, requiring the SSD and logic board to be replaced. The Mac was returned with Ventura installed. Dat on external HD's fine but the operating system and numerous programs etc completely gone.

I keep data on external HD's and would like to back up the MAC to allow me to reinstall all programs etc if it collapses again.

I head about 'built in' rebootable disks within Mac Studio making some backups redundant, but this would not work if the disk itself fails.
Currently using Backblaze and TimeMachine for backups but TM also seems to have fallen over.

What is the best practice for rebuilding a Mac Studio if the HD is replaced or fails? Ideally something like SuperDuper but there seems to be problems with its application to Mac silicon. There has to be somethiung better than dies of reinstalling software?

Any advise greatly appreciated,
thanks
simon

Why would they need to make like that when Intel and AMD already make powerful CPU and GPU than Apple Silicon?

 

[jlc1978]

Why backup to an SSD rather than a large, cheap external HD? Speed isn't an issue, right?

I use CCC to backup to a HDD, SSD and SDcard in my MBP’s slot. I’ve used CCC for many years and it is worth every penny.