TimeMachine, CCC or other? What is best to use if my workstation dies?

[jz0309]

Switched to CCC only 4 years or so ago when my then Aperture library (60k or so photos at the time) crashed and I was unable to restore it from TM backup (there's a thread about that somewhere here in the forums).
I haven't needed to restore from CCC, but I got a new Studio a few months back that I setup as new and easily copied all my dat...
Daily backup to SSD, and then weekly backups to 3 different HDDs

 

[bigfatipod]

Switched to CCC only 4 years or so ago when my then Aperture library (60k or so photos at the time) crashed and I was unable to restore it from TM backup (there's a thread about that somewhere here in the forums).
I haven't needed to restore from CCC, but I got a new Studio a few months back that I setup as new and easily copied all my dat...
Daily backup to SSD, and then weekly backups to 3 different HDDs

Am curious what you eventually converted to from Aperture…

 

[jz0309]

Am curious what you eventually converted to from Aperture…

LR classic, yes, subscription but totally worth it for me

 

[throAU]

All of these backups run in the background and don't require any attention unless something goes wrong.

This is critically important.

If backups aren't painless they don't get done frequently enough. If its any more difficult than connecting to a drive via either a dock at your desk or wifi, its too difficult to get done regularly.

Relying on yourself to copy things around manually, or manually kick off a backup is a recipe for catastrophe, because we all like to put off scheduled maintenance tasks and theft/failure has a habit of occurring exactly when you've put it off for too long.

This is why I feel cloud storage is a great "in case my own backups fail" secondary method - in addition to giving you cross device sync. When my iPad got wiped, I had not plugged it into a PC or done a backup of it in about 12 months, but as all the data on it was in the cloud, I was back up and running in well under an hour.

 

[Fishrrman]

"Relying on yourself to copy things around manually, or manually kick off a backup is a recipe for catastrophe, because we all like to put off scheduled maintenance tasks and theft/failure has a habit of occurring exactly when you've put it off for too long."

I've done this for 35 years now -- totally "manual" backups. No "automation" -- AT ALL.
It's worked out just fine for me.

 

[throAU]

"Relying on yourself to copy things around manually, or manually kick off a backup is a recipe for catastrophe, because we all like to put off scheduled maintenance tasks and theft/failure has a habit of occurring exactly when you've put it off for too long."

I've done this for 35 years now -- totally "manual" backups. No "automation" -- AT ALL.
It's worked out just fine for me.

Congrats! You're one of the few that manage to do so. For most people, it gets put off or not done at all because they either forget or don't want to manage the process.

If you automate it and make it painless its pretty difficult to screw it up.

Also, if it is automated and networked, the RTO is lower.

If my MacBook was to catch fire right this instant and I had to go back to backup media with a new machine, I'd lose the last 8 minutes of work assuming it was only saved locally.

 

[G5isAlive]

Thank you, but what i have read is that SSD is not so smart to use for longterm storage. Bette to have mechanic disks.

I orderd a Toshiba canvio advanced 1TB.

I think this is a matter of over reading and over thinking too much. While this might have been true during the early development stages of SSD, I haven't heard anyone say that modern SSDs are unstable over a few years... the jury is still out over a few decades. So sure if the intent is to copy something and lock it up in a lead lined (got to protect from cosmic radiation) vault for 30 years, maybe spinning disks is the answer. But for most back up purposes its short term, to recover from a recent crash, and I would suggest SSDs are both more stable and faster.

Before SSD's were cheap I used spinning disks for backup, but MacOS would poll the drive every now and then, resulting in spinning it up (with the resulting noise) and the whole system would pause and wait with the spinning beach ball. Made things laggy, not to mention put wear and tear on the drive (like landing a plane the largest stress on a drive is start up and stopping) and thus defeating your claim of long term stability. The alternative would be to set the OS such that the drive never went to sleep, but this would drain power, and increase noise.

Not to mention, the smaller size of a SSD makes them easier to unplug, slip in a pocket and head home for off site storage. Or if you know, the building catches fire.

So yeah. SSD all the way for backups now that they have gotten cheaper. The exception might still be for very large video libraries (> 4 tb).

 

[satcomer]

I use a Synology NAS to long term storing of picture, videos and saying stored old emails I saved from time in the Army!

 

[throAU]

I think this is a matter of over reading and over thinking too much. While this might have been true during the early development stages of SSD, I haven't heard anyone say that modern SSDs are unstable over a few years... the jury is still out over a few decades. So sure if the intent is to copy something and lock it up in a lead lined (got to protect from cosmic radiation) vault for 30 years, maybe spinning disks is the answer. But for most back up purposes its short term, to recover from a recent crash, and I would suggest SSDs are both more stable and faster.

More to the point - whether you are using SSD or hard disk, having only one backup copy is a bad idea.

SSDs fail. Hard drives fail. They both get stolen and both will die in a house fire.

Have multiple backups, ideally in multiple locations; the media type is irrelevant as far as this is concerned.

ALL drives can die, especially (it seems) when you are in the middle of attempting to restore data from them.

 

[MacDownunder]

I use TM locally (currently running MacPro 5,1 with lots of internal storage options), I then use Chronosync which is amazing and very tunable to backup to my QNAP NAS. I am surprised nobody else has mentioned it.
My NAS is in RAID 5 and it backs up to itself as well as an external USB 4TB drive so lots of points of safety
Everything - and I mean everything happens automatically, congrats to those that have successfully navigated doing this manually but human nature is not wired to do things like backups - the less the human interaction the less the chance of failure.
My NAS also shares space to three Mac laptops, two iMacs, a hackintosh and a WIn 10 Micro PC as a backup location as well - again all automated with no user involvement needed - to me critical for the other less tech savvy family members. And fit giggles the NAS also is a PLEX server, Unify Cloud Key Server and a few other things as well.
The two iMacs have internal HDDs for TM as well as dedicated SSDs, plus chrono sync backups to NAS as well
Moral to my story is I have never lost anything (home and work - professional print environment), all backups are automated and have some redundancy - further storage is cheap so IMHO backups must be part of what you do