Does anyone know how well Time Machine is for back-ups? I currently use the idea that people have here (two local backup and actually two off-site), but I use Time Machine to make the back-ups. I’ve never needed to recover anything with Time Machine. How well does it work? Any pros/cons?
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I just plug in my usb drive every 14 days when time machine gives a notification that it has not been able to back up for 14 days. Then unplug it. Dropbox and idrive run constantly for cloud backups.
The one annoyance is having to leave the laptop powered on so that idrive can work it’s cloud backup magic. It is surprisingly hard to find a backup system that will wake up the Mac to do a backup. Or maybe someone can point me in the right direction?
I wish I had a better answer; but I suspect I’d just make a hash of it.
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I really should have left my work computer on and written down its IP address back in March so I could use it as my remote repository: fast data line from a university, big enough hard drive. Rsync would be my tool of choice, with a shell script on the other end that detects changes to the backup directory, zips the data with encryption, and trashes the unencrypted data with a secure Trash emptying.
As it is the daily driver backs up to a second internal drive and rsync to an Open Media Server on a Raspberry Pi 4 with a 2 drive RAID mirror attached via USB. I just ordered a 1TB USB drive to put on it to to mirror the data drives and the user space. The Macs back up to the Open Media Server with the Time Machine plugin. The Chromebooks don’t need to be backed up. The OLPCs backup to SD cards in them. The Mac Quadra 700 running A/UX 3.1.1 backs up to a multi-volume Zip drive set with Retrospect.
AMA hahaha!
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The few times I have had to use it to recover a file or directory it worked just as you would hope and I got the data back.
Yeah, I too read the article and picked lots of holes in it.
Its not that the advice is wrong, its just that there are so many better ways of backing your daya up and for a lot less money, including free.
Also please don’t make a RAID mirror using one of those cheap desktop docks, they’re almost entirely useless for that sort of thing.
My typical backup method is one portable hard drive at the house one in a safe deposit box at my bank. Swap the two out every other month, use rsync to sync the data, replace both drives every two years (or if rsync tries to overwrite old data indicating a checksum mismatch).
With covid limiting my trips to the bank I’ve been thinking about using AWS S3 Glacier to backup offsite. It’s about 2 bucks a month to store .5TB and about 40 dollars to get it all back if something happens. The downside is you are on the hook for paying for what you store for 6 months, the data can’t change otherwise you are on the hook for the space the changes take up and it takes about 5 hours to request the data back and even more to download it all.
The few things that are stopping me are I don’t want to max out my upload bandwith for month putting my data to the cloud, Data transfer failures will happen during that time meaning time to upload again, I don’t entirely trust the cloud ( meaning I’d likely encrypt tarballs using openssl which is cool and annoying at the same time ), I should really build a NAS because I might not have the space to do encrypted tarballs of everything, and I don’t want to pay to download and check if my backups are ok…
What you did there… I see it.
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Time Machine is excellent. It has never let me down when I really needed it. You can do a full recovery like nothing ever happened. You can also easily configure it to be redundant. I still recommend backing up your most important data to a cloud service though.
To contrast, Windows’ File History backup feature has been a massive disappointment through and through. I have found it to be an immensely unreliable POS. It has always failed me in a clutch. (And don’t get me started on other backup products for Windows. They are all garbage - except for the backup component of the sadly discontinued backup Windows Home Server which was marvelous.)
I keep my crucial files on an encrypted drive in the cloud. Aside from the actual os on each machine I use, alot of my software is subscription based and I just need to log in and download a fresh copy should any of my machines fail. I haven’t backed up anything in years.
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