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Using an SSD for a Time Machine backup?

Irishman said:
I have already upgraded the internal HD in my late 2012 21.5” iMac this past year, and the new Samsung 860 EVO 1TB SSD really gave my old Mac a new lease on life.

I also have been using an external Seagate 2TB hard drive as a Time Machine backup, but now that has gone kaput. Does anyone have experience with using an external SSD for a Time Machine backup? I know that Samsung makes their T5 and T7 lines of external SSDs, but I’m not sure if anyone might be aware of any issues with regard to macOS Mojave?
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TM backups are blazing fast with an SSD and thunderbolt, even with USB 3.0 it should be very fast.

I’m not aware of issues with Mojave. I used SDD for Carbon Copy Cloner on that system and it worked perfectly; can’t speak to TM but I don’t see why it would be an issue. Monterey requires APFS now for TM but in your case it will probably have to be formatted HFS. I haven’t noticed a huge performance difference in the two formats; I think you get the SSD benefits either way.

Yes they’re a lot less storage bang for your buck, but you can get Crucial 1-2TB SDDs for reasonable prices, especially on eBay.
 
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antipodean said:
I use SSDs as time machine drives on all my macs. An assortment of 0.5, 1 and 2 TB Samsung T5s. I don’t need the speed, but I like the silence.

I found HDDs to be audible in an otherwise near silent home office.
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Yah, this is why I switched everything over to SSD. Desktop HDDs are especially loud and cause a lot of vibration.
 
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I’ve been thinking about a 2TB NVMe that’s £65 (no dram), for using for TM with a cheap 10 or 20 Gbps case.

Especially given a 2.5” 2TB HDD is about the same price (WD one is about £50, and a Seagate Baracuda was £70)
 
tarasis said:
I’ve been thinking about a 2TB NVMe that’s £65 (no dram), for using for TM with a cheap 10 or 20 Gbps case.

Especially given a 2.5” 2TB HDD is about the same price (WD one is about £50, and a Seagate Baracuda was £70)
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This must be a cheapee make....for that price?
 
I have a Qwiizlab M.2 NVMe and SATA External Enclosure with a Leven JPS600 2TB PCIe 3D NAND NVMe Gen3x4 PCIe M.2 2280 SSD with Heat Sink as a TM setup. (enclosure and ssd together are +/- $105.- on Amzon)

(Tests in Blackmagic on a mini M2: steady at W:905+ MB/s, R:895+/- MB/s)
 
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Agree with others - you “Can” use a SSD for Time Machine but it’s a waste of money.

Personally I want a minimum of 3x my data capacity on a Time Machine disk. So if you have a 1TB internal storage and no external data storage, then I’d want minimum 3TB for the Time Machine disk (which effectively means a 4TB disk; 3TB isn’t common). Just a super-quick google shows $68 for a hard drive, vs $360 for SSD. You may find slightly better pricing if you look, but essentially you’re spending 4x-5x what you need to if you go SSD.
 
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Time Machine isn’t a back up it’s a versioning system. I back up with carbon copy cloner. I have a 4TB blade SSD in my iMac and I am thinking of partitioning it into a 500MB boot and a 3.5TB Time Machine.
What are the drawbacks and limitations of having ann internal Time Machine on a blade SSD… aside from cost. If I needed to use Time Machine to rebuild my computer or transfer to a new computer would this system work.
 
jprokos said:
Time Machine isn’t a back up it’s a versioning system. I back up with carbon copy cloner. I have a 4TB blade SSD in my iMac and I am thinking of partitioning it into a 500MB boot and a 3.5TB Time Machine.
What are the drawbacks and limitations of having ann internal Time Machine on a blade SSD… aside from cost. If I needed to use Time Machine to rebuild my computer or transfer to a new computer would this system work.
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This is NOT a good idea.
A Time Machine drive should be seperate.
If your boot drive has an issue, there is a good chance you can't access the other partition.
 
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MarkC426 said:
This is NOT a good idea.
A Time Machine drive should be seperate.
If your boot drive has an issue, there is a good chance you can't access the other partition.
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Yes this is true, two storage devices are unlikely to go bad at the same time.

Maybe using this concept would be the best of both worlds… speed and redundancy. And a daily backup with CCC.
 
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ChedNasad said:
...My internal storage is 1 TB and my backup drive is likewise 1TB. ...
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That is the source of your problem. The time machine disk should be at least twice the size of the data that needs to be backed up. If the backup drive is too small, then it will spend a lot of time deleting and rewriting files. With a larger drive, very little I/O happens, so speed is unimportant.
 
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jprokos said:
Yes this is true, two storage devices are unlikely to go bad at the same time. Thus the daily backup with CCC. Maybe using this concept would be the best of both worlds… speed and redundancy.
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No. The copy" is not a very good backup. The typical scenario is that you have a good backup. Then a file is corrupted. Ten you usde you "corbon copy" and the only good copy of the file is over written.

A "carbon copy's" only advantage is that the concept is easy to understand. Other than that, it has no advantage over something like Time Machine.

And, yes tow devices do fail at the same time. The #1 reason for data los is not a failed drive but user-error. Without a versions system the damaged file will overwrite you good backup. After user error come theft of the equipment. If it is all in one place, it is all going away at once. Then you have the case of lightening hitting a utility pole and frying everything that is plugged into power, then fire and floods.
 
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ChrisA said:
No. The copy" is not a very good backup. The typical scenario is that you have a good backup. Then a file is corrupted. Ten you usde you "corbon copy" and the only good copy of the file is over written.

A "carbon copy's" only advantage is that the concept is easy to understand. Other than that, it has no advantage over something like Time Machine.

And, yes tow devices do fail at the same time. The #1 reason for data los is not a failed drive but user-error. Without a versions system the damaged file will overwrite you good backup. After user error come theft of the equipment. If it is all in one place, it is all going away at once. Then you have the case of lightening hitting a utility pole and frying everything that is plugged into power, then fire and floods.
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I used to use VMS and it had a versioning file system. So every file had a version number. When you requested a directory, you'd see all of the versions of the files. You could always purge the older versions or you could set the number of versions saved to a fixed number. I think that all of the versions got backed up as well.

I've had to restore a file or directory in the past using Time Machine. I've had to restore the whole system from Time Machine as well. I have 2 Time Machine hard drives and one is always attached and the other gets an update every month. I'm a little paranoid on it. I also keep copies of files on multiple Macs
 
ChrisA said:
No. The copy" is not a very good backup. The typical scenario is that you have a good backup. Then a file is corrupted. Ten you usde you "corbon copy" and the only good copy of the file is over written.

A "carbon copy's" only advantage is that the concept is easy to understand. Other than that, it has no advantage over something like Time Machine.
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Chris, I really don't understand what you are saying here. It could be the poor grammar and typos. If you are saying to just rely on Time Machine and don't bother with having multiple backups with CCC or another utility I absolutely disagree, and so do many others...

 
ChrisA said:
No. The copy" is not a very good backup. The typical scenario is that you have a good backup. Then a file is corrupted. Ten you usde you "corbon copy" and the only good copy of the file is over written.
Click to expand...
If you have safety net turned on for Carbon Copy Cloner, it keeps prior versions of the file. It is also much easier and faster to restore a system from a CCC backup than Time Machine. I use both but have always used CCC for restoring lost data.
 
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