Oct 03, 2012 Time Machine vs. Carbon Copy Cloner Sep 28, 2012 Being new to a Mac Mini 2011 (Mountain Lion) I am confused on what to do to back-up my Mac HD with an external USB drive in case of a mechanical failure of the former requiring replacement of the MacHD with a new one.
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. Official Documentation The developer, Mike Bombich, has written an excellent overview of this new capability. This is the major, definitive resource. That article, at the very top, also points to an. That’s a lot of material to digest, so I contacted Mike and we chatted about some of the basics that could be integrated into a short “Getting Started Q&A.” I asked what I thought might be the typical first questions from users. CCC 5.1 And APFS Snapshots Q&A Q1: What happens if I upgrade to v5.1 and just do nothing? A1: Nothing changes.
The backup plans you have in place will continue to write your clone backups to your external drive, as before. Q2: My external backup drive is an HDD. Can it be used for snaphots? A drive must be formatted as APFS for snaphots to work. Q3: My internal drive is an SSD. Can I use it with snaphots?
A3: Yes, if it’s been previously formatted as APFS during your High Sierra upgrade. Q4: I have an external SSD as my clone drive but formatted as HFS+.
Can I non-destructively convert it to APFS? If a cloned SSD drive has macOS system files on it, Disk Utility (File menu) won’t let you convert it non-destructively.
You’ll need to reformat it as APFS and start fresh. My external clone drive is an HDD with HFS+. What’s the best strategy? A5: Leave that HDD as your clone backup drive and consider enabling snapshots on your SSD startup disk. (Optional, however.) Q6: What happens if I create new backup plans in CCC 5.1? A6: Mike wrote: “Snapshot support is automatically enabled for a volume when you select that volume (or a folder on that volume) as a source or destination to a CCC backup task.
If you prefer that CCC does not automatically enable snapshot support for source and destination volumes, you can disable that behavior in CCC’s Preferences window.” (Do that right after you upgrade to 5.1 and snaphots won’t be invoked until you’re ready.) Q7: How much free space should I have on my SSD boot drive before I enable snapshots? If you have less, but have enabled snaphots, CCC will wait until you have 30 GB free to start creating permanent snaphots. Q8: If I also elect to create snaphots on an external APFS SSD, does it remain bootable? Q9: I need to revert my boot SSD to a previous snapshot. How do I do that?
A9: As the documentation linked above explains, boot from an external bootable clone, launch CCC, and use it to restore your internal SSD to a previous snapshot of the OS. They are listed and dated. Summary This Q&A was intended only to answer some of the most common beginner questions.
For all the details, refer to the Bombich Software links at the top of his article. The developer has created a powerful, nicely designed system that’s been thoroughly tested. But it’s a lot to swallow initially.
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I know what you’re thinking, “ Jeffrey, you’re crazy. You don’t need five favorite ways to backup your Mac.” Maybe so, maybe not, but color me a bit paranoid, thanks to and too much experience with recovery mode. I’m sure you understand that whatever can go wrong sometimes does, so a few extra layers of backups here and there won’t hurt anything or anyone, right? What I’ve wanted for years is a way setup and manage Mac backups to be as easy as iCloud backup is on iPhone and iPad.
Home To Cloud My backup plan may seem cumbersome, isn’t really all that expensive, but a little paranoia goes a long way these days so let me start with the basics. External disk storage. Think Mac clones. Think Time Machine.
Think cloud storage. I’ve got it all. Carbon Copy Cloner – this one has been a long time favorite and it works much like another old timer to clone a Mac’s disk drive to a bootable external disk which can be used in any emergency. Clones the Mac’s disk; manually, or on a schedule, and creates a disk which you can boot from another Mac. CCC is packed with features and options, including email notification, detailed logs, automatic backups with a scheduler, and much more, but it relies on the tried and true Source and Destination method.
And it works with Apple’s new APFS file system in macOS High Sierra. The only drawback is the need for a paid upgrade every couple of years or so. – I don’t know if there is a simpler way to clone a Mac into a perfect and bootable backup., as with CCC makes perfect clones of your Mac’s disk drive to an external storage device. It, too, has a scheduler built-in, and a few more esoteric options but the basics are about all you need. That’s about as easy as you can get, right? SuperDuper!’s initial backup may take a few hours, but subsequent backups– manually initiated or on a schedule– usually take just minutes. Why do I use both CCC and SuperDuper!?
I bought both years ago and SuperDuper! Has never charged for an upgrade. Two are better than one. ChronoSync – if there’s a Mac backup and sync utility that does as much as I haven’t tried it yet. I’ve never paid for an update and new features make it invaluable for syncing or backing up files from one Mac to another destination, either on a local network or to off premise locations like Amazon S3 or Google Cloud. Again, ChronoSync uses the standard Source and Destination targets, but comes with far more features than either Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper!
For example, use Creation Assistants to setup a bootable backup, disk image backups, sync folders, or sync to multiple folders on multiple devices. ChronoSync gets granular with options to validate files, add triggers to automated and scheduled backups, and much, much more. Again, upgrades are free. I’ve used ChronoSync for years. That said, the list of features can be daunting to Mac newbies, but there is try-before-you-buy.
Now a look at the two Apple backup systems I use. One new, and one I don’t like but use anyway. Time Machine – this is Apple’s built-in Mac backup system and it performs differently than the three above.
Time Machine backs up files on your Mac that have changed, and creates versions of files that have changed over time. The time machine aspect means you can back up through time to find a file before it was changed or before it was deleted. That can be very handy. Time Machine can also restore a Mac but compared to a cloned disk from the other three, it’s like going back to 1999. Worse, Time Machine has not been a stellar performer through the years and seems to go wonky from time to time which requires too much manual labor to get back into gear. But it’s free and my only expense is an extra hard disk drive. Time Machine to iCloud would be nice.
ICloud – That brings me to iCloud Drive and iCloud backup. I’ve used iCloud for Photos and iCloud drive most of this year. It’s slow but eventually gets files in sync between devices, including iPhone and iPad and other Macs. The real value is putting Documents and Desktop folders onto iCloud and it’s easy but takes awhile. That means everything you store on the Mac’s Desktop and Documents folders show up on other iCloud connected Macs, and in the Files app for iPhone and iPad. That can be very handy. There you go.
Five different but similar Mac backup systems. Four of them require an external disk drive or a network drive, but ChronoSync can also back up to online cloud services. UPDATE – If advancing age brings lapses in memory, then I’m on may way to the December of my years. It’s running on my Mac now and does cloud backups to a variety of online sources.