Sorry for the really long post, but I wanted to put all the info here so it makes the most sense to you readers. For many years, I have relied solely on clone backups for my Macs. Carbon Copy Cloner has been my best friend who never let me down. However, in the past few years, I have admittedly been lazy with my backup practices, and I want to get back on track before anything bad happens.
My setup has been two Macs, one for me and one for my wife, along with 3 portable, bus powered externals. For the past 5 years or so, these have been a couple 120GB Firelite firewire 400 drives and a 1TB OWC OTG firewire 800 drive. The general practice has been that I clone each of the two Macs on the Firelite drives and take them to work, leaving the OWC home. Every week or so I back up both Macs to their own partitions on the OWC drive and swap it with the smaller ones at work. Due to the ever growing size of our data, I have resorted to making a third partition on the 1TB drive to backup the data that won't fit on the 120GB clones or our internal drives. To make up for the lack of redundancy and access to files while the drive is at work, I added a 3TB drive to my Mac Mini HTPC that runs my home media and is on 24/7, sort of acting like a NAS. Its primary job was to hold media, but about 750GB is our shared data form the two Macs, mostly my photos and work files. This computer is also connected to Backblaze. So the data on the "NAS" is backed up constantly to Backblaze, along with the clones which get plugged into it once a month to keep the cloned data backed up to Backblaze servers too. What I have is a rather redundant setup, but the NAS is the only way to access my data when the 1TB drive is at work. So I have resorted to accessing my data over the LAN, which isn't as fast as being on my internal drive. To keep things backed up well, I did try scheduling a backup task in CCC to back this up when I connect the drive to my HTPC Mini, but I just don't find myself connecting it enough to run like I want it to. Plus, with all the different drives and machines, it's so convoluted that I don't know anymore what's backed up and what's not. The 3TB NAS drive also contains some of my most important data, so that has me feeling uncomfortable that I am not backing it up regularly enough.
This whole practice was set up like this purely because I already owned the drives mentioned, and I wanted to save money by using what I already had. It seemed simple enough, but after a year or two became a hassle. Also, I ran out of internal storage on my MBP, which is where most of it is created and accessed from. Now, I have a new iMac with a 1TB SSD, which is much larger than my previous MBP HD, and I can manage to get a lot of the data from the NAS back to my own machine if I choose to. My problem is trying to figure out how to make a better backup practice that I won't forget to do. So I want to start using Time Machine, which I have never used before. Also, I no longer have a firewire port, so I am thinking it's best to get some new enclosures and larger drives now, to make it simpler.
The new situation is an iMac with 1TB storage and a MBP with a 250GB HDD. I would like to figure out a way to make triple redundancy backups using a combination of external drives, local NAS, Time machine and clones along with Backblaze online backup. I prefer to have a clone at home and one at work for each machine. Along with something that remains connected to Backblaze at home. I would like to have one drive that I can clone regularly to, and it could stay at home connected to the Mini and backup up on the network with scheduled tasks so I don't forget.
Now I just don't know how big of drives to get for Time Machine, because I don't have experience knowing how much space it takes for version backup with TM. I would say I have about 0.75TB-1.25TB of data to backup. To make it more confusing, I want to consolidate connectors, so I can use it on both the old MBP and the new iMac to avoid having to buy a different drive for each machine. I have settled on USB 3.0 or 3.1 type A. I have no interest in going to type C yet because I have 2 other PCs here that have USB, but nothing else. So I am willing to deal with the slower speeds of backward compatible USB in case I need to use the drives on my PCs. I have HFS reading ability on these drives, so I can share drives.
I guess I should add the most logical thing to do would be TM both machines to the NAS and clone that by plugging in one a week with the alternating drives, but from my understanding, there is no way to make a bootable clone from TM, which I need in case of catastrophic failure. So this means I think I need both clones and TM of two machines.
Hope this makes some sense and someone can help me feel less overwhelmed!
My setup has been two Macs, one for me and one for my wife, along with 3 portable, bus powered externals. For the past 5 years or so, these have been a couple 120GB Firelite firewire 400 drives and a 1TB OWC OTG firewire 800 drive. The general practice has been that I clone each of the two Macs on the Firelite drives and take them to work, leaving the OWC home. Every week or so I back up both Macs to their own partitions on the OWC drive and swap it with the smaller ones at work. Due to the ever growing size of our data, I have resorted to making a third partition on the 1TB drive to backup the data that won't fit on the 120GB clones or our internal drives. To make up for the lack of redundancy and access to files while the drive is at work, I added a 3TB drive to my Mac Mini HTPC that runs my home media and is on 24/7, sort of acting like a NAS. Its primary job was to hold media, but about 750GB is our shared data form the two Macs, mostly my photos and work files. This computer is also connected to Backblaze. So the data on the "NAS" is backed up constantly to Backblaze, along with the clones which get plugged into it once a month to keep the cloned data backed up to Backblaze servers too. What I have is a rather redundant setup, but the NAS is the only way to access my data when the 1TB drive is at work. So I have resorted to accessing my data over the LAN, which isn't as fast as being on my internal drive. To keep things backed up well, I did try scheduling a backup task in CCC to back this up when I connect the drive to my HTPC Mini, but I just don't find myself connecting it enough to run like I want it to. Plus, with all the different drives and machines, it's so convoluted that I don't know anymore what's backed up and what's not. The 3TB NAS drive also contains some of my most important data, so that has me feeling uncomfortable that I am not backing it up regularly enough.
This whole practice was set up like this purely because I already owned the drives mentioned, and I wanted to save money by using what I already had. It seemed simple enough, but after a year or two became a hassle. Also, I ran out of internal storage on my MBP, which is where most of it is created and accessed from. Now, I have a new iMac with a 1TB SSD, which is much larger than my previous MBP HD, and I can manage to get a lot of the data from the NAS back to my own machine if I choose to. My problem is trying to figure out how to make a better backup practice that I won't forget to do. So I want to start using Time Machine, which I have never used before. Also, I no longer have a firewire port, so I am thinking it's best to get some new enclosures and larger drives now, to make it simpler.
The new situation is an iMac with 1TB storage and a MBP with a 250GB HDD. I would like to figure out a way to make triple redundancy backups using a combination of external drives, local NAS, Time machine and clones along with Backblaze online backup. I prefer to have a clone at home and one at work for each machine. Along with something that remains connected to Backblaze at home. I would like to have one drive that I can clone regularly to, and it could stay at home connected to the Mini and backup up on the network with scheduled tasks so I don't forget.
Now I just don't know how big of drives to get for Time Machine, because I don't have experience knowing how much space it takes for version backup with TM. I would say I have about 0.75TB-1.25TB of data to backup. To make it more confusing, I want to consolidate connectors, so I can use it on both the old MBP and the new iMac to avoid having to buy a different drive for each machine. I have settled on USB 3.0 or 3.1 type A. I have no interest in going to type C yet because I have 2 other PCs here that have USB, but nothing else. So I am willing to deal with the slower speeds of backward compatible USB in case I need to use the drives on my PCs. I have HFS reading ability on these drives, so I can share drives.
I guess I should add the most logical thing to do would be TM both machines to the NAS and clone that by plugging in one a week with the alternating drives, but from my understanding, there is no way to make a bootable clone from TM, which I need in case of catastrophic failure. So this means I think I need both clones and TM of two machines.
Hope this makes some sense and someone can help me feel less overwhelmed!
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