My quest: Get a good backup of my 8 TB MBP before upgrading to 26

[MareLuce]

I don’t approach storage the way you do.

I have my System Software, my Applications, and non-media Documents files… and that takes up very little storage…

I think your approach is wrong.


What I suggest is that you break your storage and your backups into two pools. One of the pools contains your System Software, the Applications, and your non-media documents. The other pool contains the media files which, I assume, are likely taking up 7.5 TB of your 8 TB.

For most of us, our media collection does not change, it only grows. In my case, I take thousands of 45 megapixel RAW photos. I have about 4 TB of them... but I keep them separate from my other files, in folders which are excluded from Time Machine backup. In my case, I backup my photos manually to an external SSD, which gets backed up to my NAS.

And my basic system/applications/documents, which still includes some photos and videos but not a lot... that's only about 200 GB and it gets backed up to two separate Time Machine drives. One is direct attached and the other is my NAS.

Managing the backup of a single monolithic 8 or 16 TB volume is a lot. If you don't separate the media files out, then every time your backup software runs a backup, it's going to run through all 8 or 16 TB of stuff to see if any of them have changed... and you know perfectly well that 15 1/2 of that 16 TB isn't going to change ever, because you took the photos of your kid's 6th birthday party ten years ago and you just want to keep it as-is.

Thank you @Alameda for your thoughtful reply.

I will reread after I start this phone back up. Am taking a vacation day tomorrow to tackle a bunch of this so your reply is perfect timing.

 

[Alameda]

Thank you @Alameda for your thoughtful reply.

I will reread after I start this phone back up. Am taking a vacation day tomorrow to tackle a bunch of this so your reply is perfect timing.

I’m happy to help more if you have more questions or if I was confusing.

 

[goldmac2006]

Before I install Tahoe (MacOS 26) , I need a good backup of my 8 TB M1 Max MacBook Pro drive.
AND, Before I move houses, I want to merge the contents of alllllll my HDDs, SDD, M.2's, etc and some of my Dad's HDDs with his code on it that he gave me.

Hardware:
I'm thinking about buying
1 - this enclosure from a German company I've never heard of "Icy Box".
https://a.co/d/8vrOWXB

2 - a huge HDD (16 TB or larger, something with 7200 RPMs) as the target.

Software:
Can't trust Time Machine. So many errors trying to complete a backup that I stopped using it years ago.
GoodSync is amazing for file sync-ing. I have used it for 10 years.
Carbon Copy Cloner 7 seems to have a good rep for full clones.

Any thoughts on this approach?

View attachment 2551555

My friend who uses his 14 inch MacBook Pro M4 Pro 2TB, he uses a NAS server-style storage solution to do his Time Machine backup.

If you have to do it for high storage volumes like that I recommend it vs an external SSD that has a lot of storage for the sake of price

 

[MareLuce]

Dang it man...
Returned home to this error.

There's tons of free space on a newly formatted 4TB NVME stick for my 1 TB iPhone 16 Pro Max backup.
It probably just disconnected for some reason.

Do I need to use a Keep Awake program?

 

[MareLuce]

2 hrs 30 min later,
Same error just now happened again after 99% complete. 🤯 It is not a sleep issue. I was right there.
Maybe it's the NVME enclosure, an old one I haven't used in a while.

Amazon is bringing a new one tomorrow.

(old one...)

 

[H_D]

Crucial and Samsung offer affordable and solid SSDs, carbon copy cloner is the way to go, though not as convenient anymore as some years back, when you basically could mirror your old computer to a new one. Now it goes via Migration Tool, which is a step more, but works perfectly well.

 

[Alameda]

Thank you @Alameda for your thoughtful reply.

I will reread after I start this phone back up. Am taking a vacation day tomorrow to tackle a bunch of this so your reply is perfect timing.

Here are some more details:

In Time Machine Settings, you can select Options, then click the + to select Folder(s) which are excluded from backup. This is where I excluded the folders of media files. I don't get fancy or obsessive about this.

Here are my drives:

• 512 GB Internal SSD
• 4 TB External SSD for Media Storage
• 4 TB External SSD for Time Machine
• 11 TB Synology NAS drive for both Time Machine and Media Storage.This is a 4 drive RAID setup. 16 TB of drives providing 11 TB of actual storage.
  • 8 TB USB backup drive

You don't need all of this; it's just what I've acquired over time.


This is how I work:

• For everything except photography and videography, I just "use the Mac" and everything backs up to Time Machine. I have two separate Time Machine backups. One goes to my NAS and one goes to the SSD drive.
• For photography and videography, I take the card out of my camera, put in the Mac's card reader, and copy all files to my Mac Desktop. Then I rename the folder as <Event><Date>. For example, Smith Wedding 4 August 2025.

I do my photo or video editing. The files might be there a few days or a week, but once my edits are done, I MOVE the folder to my SSD Media Storage drive and then to my NAS. I do this manually. Those drives have top-level folders like so: 2018, 2019, 2020, etc. Once the 4 TB filled up, deleted the older years and they're stored only on the NAS and on its backup.

The result is that my Mac is all Time Machine backed up. With 512 GB internal on a 4 TB drive, the Time Machine goes back more than one year. And my large media files are backed up separately and easy to access. I'm sure there are many other ways, but this works perfectly for me.

The NAS has pros and cons. The pros are mostly that it's always-on for everyone in your network, it automatically backs up, and its accessible over the internet. The cons are that its expensive, slow, and you need to configure it carefully. For me, I bought a Synology and followed YouTube videos by a guy called SpaceRex, which helped a lot. I ran an Ethernet cable from my Thunderbolt dock to my router, to get the fastest speed possible, but 1 gbit Ethernet is pretty slow for anything real time. For unattended backups it doesn't matter much, but for browsing directories and copying files you need, it's sluggish. You can get 2.5 gig Ethernet but 10 gig Ethernet is still very expensive, as far as I know.

 

[splifingate]

That's insane! What made MacOS think to put a symbolic link there in my personal directory?

(I will read the full doc - maybe the answer is in there?)

Sanity is in the eye of the immediacy of the individual beholder.

The other half of our understanding is really a product of actually working-with such things. Linking one idea to another is core to the 'technology' as-we-know-it.

You've seen the file&folder icons on your Desktop, correct? These are merely programmatic, visual-refferant locators that allow us to symbolically (e.g. 'digitally') associate an idea with a data-resource.

These are really just visual symbolically-related links which serve to point to cohesive chunks of encapsulated data which can eventually and directly relate to each other (therefore (potentially) providing true 'meaning').

Take a minute of reflection, and dissolve "A picture says a thousand words..." into your heart.

Thank you for your reply.

80 TB! You WIN!

Are there any hard drive brands you would never buy again?

yw

To be sure: we ALL win when we can easily store, find and retrieve our data.

I can safely say that I would never, ever, purchase a c.1997 Maxtor drive again.