Dumb (Probably) Back-up Question

[jparker402]

I have a MacBook Air, am currently running Catalina, and using Time Machine with a WD My Passport for Mac drive. I have been blissfully running Time Machine and the WD drive for around five years. So far (as far as I know) everything is working great. But is it? I honestly have no idea! How do I know if my WD drive is working? Will some warning sign pop up on the screen if it isn't? What kind of check should I do to find out if all is well?

 

[Apple_Robert]

If there has been a problem with any of the Time Machine backups, you will give a notification on your Mac screen alerting you.

 

[hodad66]

I am new to all this (PCs all my life) and set up an external SSD for time machine. Recently the SSD
refused to eject & when I looked into Time Machine the RESTORE was greyed out. I picked up a trial
of Carbon Copy Cloner and made my first "clone" this morning. So far it looks good & I can eject the disk.

 

[Apple_Robert]

I am new to all this (PCs all my life) and set up an external SSD for time machine. Recently the SSD
refused to eject & when I looked into Time Machine the RESTORE was greyed out. I picked up a trial
of Carbon Copy Cloner and made my first "clone" this morning. So far it looks good & I can eject the disk.

CCC is a great program. I use it to back up to an external drive as well as to a remote Mac. Always good to have a backup of your backup.

 

[glenthompson]

Testing should be a part of any backup strategy. I suggest renaming or moving a random file then trying to restore it from the backup. In addition to the TM backup you should have an offsite backup. Disk drives are cheap, recreating my data is not.

 

[HDFan]

If there has been a problem with any of the Time Machine backups, you will give a notification on your Mac screen alerting you.

I have instances where backups had no problems, but when a restore started diving deep into the data it found corruptions and failed.

Be sure to have a 3-2-1 backup strategy and only one of those should be TM, as it tends to fail. One way to verify a backup is to do a restore.

 

[hodad66]

I am new to all this (PCs all my life) and set up an external SSD for time machine. Recently the SSD
refused to eject & when I looked into Time Machine the RESTORE was greyed out. I picked up a trial
of Carbon Copy Cloner and made my first "clone" this morning. So far it looks good & I can eject the disk.

Now the T5 I backed up to yesterday won't mount (cannot be seen).... maybe it was the SSD all along.
Older model but never used until recently.

UPDATE. It ended up being my OWC dock so I turned it off and on.... now working again.