How to backup 4 TB Mac the right way?

[AppleEco]

Hi everyone,

So 4 TB want to be backed up regularly with Time machine. Cost efficient, fast (thunderbolt?), with 3 rotational backups.

Apple recommends to use at least twice the size of the drive. So for me that is then 8 TB. I also want to have some extra space for my big files, like 4k drone footage that is not on the mac.

Buying an external drive is easy. BUT, we all need multiple backups to rotate between them and be safer. Lets say 3 of them. A NAS makes no sense because who wants to buy multiple NAS? Or can some NAS just accept daily new drives and immediatly start updating the found Time Machine backup??

Buying 3 external 10/12 TB seems to be an option. BUT would it not be nicer to have ONE enclosure only that allows daily fast swaps of the external drives? So on a daily basis the used time machine could fill the updates. No idea how to keep the drone footage synced across the three drives.

Does someone have an approach?
- No to cloud,
- no to 3 enclosures.
- Must be fast (thunderbolt?)
- must not involve a screwdriver. Fast swaps

Thanks,
Marko from Germany

 

[throAU]

You can buy external caddies which can do pluggable 3.5" drives.

Not sure if you'll get one with thunderbolt, but unless you're looking at SSDs you're not going to push USB 3.x anyway - spinning disks top out at a couple of hundred meg per second (normally much slower when processing lots of small files) which USB will handle.

Standard disclaimer about storing/handling your bare 3.5" drives properly applies.


However, I'm going to plug the pros for a NAS here - backing up 4 TB is gonna take ages. Which means you need your drive plugged in for ages.

If you're using a MacBook (OP isn't clear) relying on WIFI (to a NAS) might be a lot more convenient. If its a desktop Mac, ignore that...

Maybe then back the NAS up to an external drive on a schedule for off-site backup.

 

[leman]

Why not get a NAS with two backup partitions (+backup the NAS itself) and plugged external hard drive? Should give you the strategy you want.

 

[ader42]

If it was for home use I would probably get 3 external drives on a hub in a cupboard, so all three plugged in at once but only one switched on at once - all 3 having the same volume name. The cupboard is the enclosure

Each morning I would eject the backup drive on the desktop, then turn that one off and turn the next one on - thereby rotating the backup drives.

 

[Larabee119]

Back up to NAS with Time Machine over SMB.
That's what I do. I have 10gb network and the backup is fast enough for my 4TB NVME.

 

[splitpea]

I’m pretty sure you can get one multi-bay NAS and treat each physical drive as a separate logical drive if you want. Then it’s just one device for all your drives.

 

[chrisgeleven]

I use Time Machine to a NAS, then have an external hard drive on the NAS that backs up the NAS nightly. Then I use Backblaze for online/offsite backup.

 

[400]

My time machine backup just went south. Have another plan on top of this not only time machine. I use carbon copy cloner as well.
I have a cloud backup that is not iCloud as well, and off site disk quarterly updated.

 

[PeterJP]

I stopped using TimeMachine when I got my 2TB machine. With 256GB it was a hassle to run it over a network already. With 2TB, impossible.

If ever I will set it up again, I will treat system and data as separate things. System - backup with TimeMachine. Data - manual over network shares. If I really need a backup for my data, then I'll back up the network share, not the laptop.

I'm also using OneDrive (1TB free with O365), but I'm aiming to move away from it for certain parts of my data (say, company accounting and password files).