Carbon copy cloner vs time machine9/21/2023 ![]() ![]() But, it is important to remember that TM is not an "archival" backup. TM is a great program, and many people don't realize that it has different configuration options, too. I also run Time Machine to a single external 8TB drive. In the case of Armageddon, I will have bigger concerns than my backups. This system gives me as close to 100% security as is possible, short of Armageddon. No need to reinstall the drive in the original enclosure. Should I need to access a file from years ago, I have an inexpensive little device that reads a "naked" disk. ![]() OWC offers several drive enclosures allowing you to do this. When the external disks get full, I pull them out of the enclosure, label them by year, store them away, and simply install new drives which are relatively inexpensive. Make sure, however, you completely understand how CCC works before attempting this kind of setup. CCC also allows me to configure different backup protocols for each. So, I back up my startup SSD to one "drive," cleverly named "Backup SSD," and I back up all work and photo files to another "drive" on the same external, having the name "Master." This allows me to keep startup and work files separately on a single large external HD, avoiding a proliferation of disks. CCC allows me to configure two individual backup "drives" on a single external disk in a partition-like allocation. All my work files are on the aforementioned external four-disk, 12 TB RAID. I have a SSD internal in my iMac as a startup drive, containing only system files and applications. Yes, it means that I must run CCC for each disk, a bit tedious, but I really don't care since CCC runs in the background. So, I back up important files directly to individual external drives, known as JBOD (just a bunch of disks). RAIDs are great systems, and provide security in almost all cases, but they are not 100% infallible. It took out all the disks comprising my RAID. A hardware problem once wiped out a year's worth of files on a RAID external I was using. ![]() RAIDs can completely fail, which I have unfortunately experienced. While my computer's working drive is a four-disk RAID 5, I do not use a RAID system for backup. I back up photo and work files to no fewer than four external hard drives. CCC has a bit of a learning curve, but that is inevitable given the number of ways it can be configured to individual needs. Inexpensive, updated regularly (usually at no cost), and very well supported with extensive documentation. I suppose I could chain the second external drive to the first one.īut what would be the best way to go about making a backup copy of the Time Machine backup volume? Should I just use Carbon Copy Cloner to create a copy of the Time Machine hard drive onto the second drive, and then continue using CCC to do updates? And if I did that, and I ever substituted the cloned Time Machine drive for the original one, would the Mac OS be fooled into thinking that it was the original Time Machine volume, or would it detect that it was not the original drive and reject it?Īny thoughts or advice on this would be most appreciated.I've used CCC for almost as long as it has been around, and it is an outstanding program. So if I did that, I would have two external backup drives: one of them running Time Machine, and the other one would be a copy of Time Machine that I would keep turned off most of the time, but would continually update, say every day or two, to keep the backup current. I have another big external hard drive that I could devote to this purpose. However, I thought it might be a good idea, in case this should ever happen again, to have a backup for Time Machine. I did lose a year's worth of backups that I suppose I could have gotten into to restore things that I might lose, or to find an original version of something, but otherwise, not a problem. So I just had Time Machine make a fresh backup and carry on, no big deal (although it took many hours to do). I was initializing a flash drive, and I thought I was being careful, but after initializing the flash drive my Time Machine volume was also erased (it's a 10TB hard drive in an external OWC enclosure, plugged into the back of the Mac). I recently had my Time Machine backup get erased, how I'm not sure. I've got OS 10.11.6 running in a 2010 Mac Pro 5,1 tower. ![]()
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