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Time Machine Backups Question
- Thread starter Robert4
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You use the existing one. The only issue I have had is when I used a VM to run Windows and the existing license would not activate and I had t o call MS and explain I've upgraded the system and they made it work. Fusion asked me if I wanted to migrate the VM to the new machine.
I’ve used Time Machine for many years, on many systems. I have learned a lot.
The biggest strength: If your computer is broken or stolen, you can get a new one, restore from Time Machine, and your computer will be exactly as it was. Every Single Thing. If the new laptop has a newer MacOS, it will still work. It is fantastic in that respect. You can exclude items from backup, but besides that, everything is backed up except things the OS doesn’t need, such as cache files.
Second big strength: If you want to find an old file you’ve deleted, you can “go back in time”, find the file, and copy it to your hard drive. The oldest files eventually purge off as the backup drive fills, so you can’t 100% depend on this after, say, six months or a year.
Biggest weakness: I found that the backup times grind to a crawl after about a year of use. Some people say this has been fixed, but the safe bet is that if your backups begin to slow, format your backup drive and start a whole new Time Machine.
Workaround: I am a photographer, and I create far more content than my internal drive can store. So my main photo backup is outside of Time Machine. That’s not a Time Machine problem, it’s an “Apple charges way too much for storage” problem.
Security: You can encrypt your entire Time Machine volume, and you should, just as you should encrypt your Mac hard disk.
Limitations: Time Machine has limitations which you must understand. Specifically, a backup to one external drive makes you badly vulnerable to theft and fire. If somebody breaks into your home or office, they will steal all your stuff. Thieves will not be nice and leave your backup drive behind to help you out. You must get data off-site to be safe, even if you only do it once a month. If your data is used for your business, then you need to definitely get off-site backup included into your system.
Here’s what I did: I replaced my direct-attached USB backup with a Synology NAS. This has four drives configured with redundancy. If one drive fails, the system continues. I plugged it into a UPS, along with my WiFi gateway. If I lose power for more than five minutes, the Synology will shut down, to prioritize keeping my Internet running. The Synology does many things: It is a network-attached Time Machine for my wife and me. Nothing to plug in; the MacBooks just find the Synology and run a Time Machine Backup to them automatically. I don’t even have to think about it. Second, I have many TB’s of separate storage for my photos. Third, I can give colleagues remote access to my Synology any time. I can create an account and put files into folders for them. Four, I have a giant USB drive attached to the Synology, and the Synology backs up automatically to that drive. So if the Synology board blows up or something, I have a full backup of my backup. Finally, I have another Synology at my brother-in-law’s house, out of state. My Synology automatically does an encrypted backup to that Synology. This gives me full protection in case of theft or fire. I put these things into operation over a period of time; I didn’t do it all at once.
The problem with the Synology is that its 1 Gig Ethernet interface is extremely slow. The initial Time Machine will run overnight or longer, preferably using wired Ethernet for max speed. Copying 50 GB of photos takes a long time; just start the copy and go to lunch. I cannot effectively search through the Synology or edit photos from it, so I bought an ultra-fast, very small external Thunderbolt drive for this purpose.
I realize that this is likely overkill for you, but I am hoping that I spent this time to help you get an overview of the strengths and weaknesses, so that you can understand what you need to do for your situation. If you are running a business with your computers, you must get your data reliably backed up off-site, at least the critical business data. If all you do is buy a USB drive and run Time Machine to it, you have much better protection than you have now. If you buy a second USB drive and run a second Time Machine to it, and you rotate your two drives off-site, you have very robust fire/theft protection. You don’t need to get as fancy as I did; my situation is probably not the same as yours.
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I definitely have encountered this in the past and it was so painful. Hasn't been an issue later. One of my drives is older and if it's been 2 weeks since I turned it on it can take a while but with my newer drive that I back up to fairly frequently no issue.
It hasn’t been a problem for me with the Time Machine I started about six months ago on my Synology. So far, so good, but I’m keeping an eye on it.
Thank you Robert for such a excel;;ent, detailed and useful reply.
Is it possible for TM to backup individual user on the same Mac?
Time Machine does not make separate backups for individual users. It carries over permissions so they can't browse other user's files.
Since it allows you to exclude files, I suspect you could create 2 partitions on a back up drive or use 2 drives and in one TM backup exclude one user folder and in another the other. I have not tried that.
Thank you. I have my kids accounts on my Mac which aren't worthy of backing up and losing HD space so thought I can leave their accounts off the backup 😆
Sure, just be aware you'll need to rest them up if you restore from TM
Final Draft (if anyone is unfortunate enough to have to use that) has particularly aggressive and user-hostile copy protection. If you fail to de-register your copy before you wipe your old machine, you have to email their snarky tech support people who will unlock it for you, but also scold you for not deactivating. One of the many reasons I moved on to Highland.
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I lost a computer and its backup in a burglary years ago and have been pretty fanatical about offsite backup since then. My current method is to keep one Time Machine drive (encrypted) in my desk at work and bring it home every month for a full backup of everything I have. If my house burned down, any gap since the last offsite backup would be filled in by iCloud Drive, which syncs all my active files.
One other thing people forget about, I think: you also have to back up your external drives. I think a lot of people move old stuff off their boot drive onto some archive drive, and then forget about it. You have to assume that any storage device can fail at any moment, so nothing important should ever live on only one drive.
Can’t you specify inclusion of connected external drive? I think default off but can include.
Answering my own question - yes. https://www.macworld.com/article/229391/how-to-make-sure-time-machine-backs-up-external-drives.html
I could not roll my eyes enough at a person on here who claimed that he didn't need offsite backup because fire, theft, storms, etc couldn't happen to him.
IMHO, you should at least have a second HD backup that you rotate periodically to stay current off site. Otherwise, you have a single point of failure unless you do cloud backups as well.
Yeah, as you found out you can definitely tell Time Machine to include externals. Obviously that applies to Carbon Copy Cloner as well.