I work in a Windows environment and use a combination of an MS application called "RoboCopy and Synology NAS drives for backup. I have Robocopy set up to automatically back up my desktop drive to the NAS drive every night. Following that backup, my NAS drive backups up via the Synology Portal and suite of products to another Synology-based NAS at my sons house, therefore providing off-site backup. This works very well and has no recurring costs. Sort of our own private cloud. The image below details our infrastructure and process
I am trying to provide the same functionality for my daughter-in-law, who has a photography business and has all of her backups on an assortment of USB-based Western Digital drives. But she is Mac-based
Does anyone know of:
1: A backup application that runs on a Mac that would do scheduled backups.
2: The method used in a Mac environment for attaching a NAS drive to a Mac in the same way that one may be attached to a Windows-based desktop?
I can then provide backup for that drive via the Synology suite in a drive at my house, again providing her with off-site backup.
I can't help with the NAS part, but Carbon Copy Cloner can do scheduled backups. Also, Apple includes Time Machine with all Macs, and it has a useful backup methodology. For fulls and incrementals, though, I'd go with CCC.
BTW: She might be able to mount one of your NAS volumes viia FTP or similar protocol and backup directly to it, although that would take longer than DAS backup.
Or, if you routinely see each other, she could have 2 sets of backup drives, keep one at her house, give you the other, and you could swap drives when you're visiting.
Abbot,
Thanks for the quick response. I will look into CCC. I do agree that a remote FTP backup would take a long time, depending upon her total volume of files. With my backup which I coordinate with another son, we actually did the first backup locally and then continued with incremental backups to his location again using Synology's backup utility. Synology does support Mac with several different solutions, so I have to do a little homework on what might work best. But your advice will certainly help.
Hi Chas
Could you share which Mac she has. The number of ports available and type of ports dictates some of the options that are possible. Also, are all those USB drives all hooked up simultaneously to the Mac or not. In advance of that here is what I use with my MacBook Pro
I have a single large external drive for Time Machine backup, which keeps everything backed up regularly and automatically. I also use BackBlaze for off-site backup. That backup also backs up regularly and automatically as well. If I needed external storage beyond my 4TB internal SSD, I would add another single large external Hard Drive, leave it continuously hooked up to my MacBook Pro so it too would be automatically backed up locally and offsite as well.
There are some additional practices of when to decommission the external drives yet will wait until more info is provided on the characteristcis of your daughters system.
John Wheeler wrote:
Hi Chas
Could you share which Mac she has. The number of ports available and type of ports dictates some of the options that are possible. Also, are all those USB drives all hooked up simultaneously to the Mac or not. In advance of that here is what I use with my MacBook Pro
I have a single large external drive for Time Machine backup, which keeps everything backed up regularly and automatically. I also use BackBlaze for off-site backup. That backup also backs up regularly and automatically as well. If I needed external storage beyond my 4TB internal SSD, I would add another single large external Hard Drive, leave it continuously hooked up to my MacBook Pro so it too would be automatically backed up locally and offsite as well.
There are some additional practices of when to decommission the external drives yet will wait until more info is provided on the characteristcis of your daughters system....Show more →
John,
I do not know what year or model she has, but I do know that her USB drives are not hooked up simultaneously. The setup I described above provides for the same level of protection a BackBlaze without recurring charges. I also know that a number of the cloud-based services also have additional charges for any restore activity, especially if a full restore is required. I do not know if this is the case with BackBlaze. I realize that most users don't have multiple "techies" in their families and cannot utilize the methodology we use, but since we have that capability, we figure why not use it. All that being said, any method or best practices pointers you can provide are greatly appreciated.
chas wrote:
John,
I do not know what year or model she has, but I do know that her USB drives are not hooked up simultaneously. The setup I described above provides for the same level of protection a BackBlaze without recurring charges. I also know that a number of the cloud-based services also have additional charges for any restore activity, especially if a full restore is required. I do not know if this is the case with BackBlaze. I realize that most users don't have multiple "techies" in their families and cannot utilize the methodology we use, but since we have that capability, we figure why not use it. All that being said, any method or best practices pointers you can provide are greatly appreciated.
Hi Chas
I don't have a lot more to add. The Time Machine backups are incremental backups.
When there are semi-automatic steps it opens backup holes. e.g. the discipline to make sure that any drive in use is both locally backed up and remotely backed up before disconnection. That's one of the reasons I lean towards not having multiple drives that are sometimes totally disconnected.
If on auto, making sure the backups occur at the same frequency of which you are willing to risk loss of data e.g. if you are not worried about losing a days worth of work then backup daily could be OK. If you don't want to lose an hours worth of work, then the backups should be automatically every hour.
Basically, trying to remove situations that allow human error of lack of discipline to leave a gap in the local or remote backup strategy.
To reduce risk of disk failures, a good practice is to have them replaced every 3 to 5 years for hard drives and every 5 to 7 years for non-commerical SSDs. That's more of a front line defense to lower the reliance on the backup strategy.
Here is a link to some BackBlaze statistics for the over 300K disk drives they are running. It may give an idea on which disks are doing better than others in failure rates: BackBlace_Drive_Statistics
chas wrote:
John,
I do not know what year or model she has, but I do know that her USB drives are not hooked up simultaneously. The setup I described above provides for the same level of protection a BackBlaze without recurring charges. I also know that a number of the cloud-based services also have additional charges for any restore activity, especially if a full restore is required. I do not know if this is the case with BackBlaze. I realize that most users don't have multiple "techies" in their families and cannot utilize the methodology we use, but since we have that capability, we figure why not use it. All that being said, any method or best practices pointers you can provide are greatly appreciated.
Apparently some of the cloud backup options are also very peculiar/picky about external hard drives. IIRC, especially ones not continuously attached to the system. I like your private cloud solution.
I don't really have anything to add other than another vote for CCC. I too have been using them for a very long time (maybe 20 years?).
I used to use CCC to make fully bootable backups but it appears Apple has really locked down their systems now that don't like booting from an external. And you can't swap out drives/storage now anyway. So for me OS backups with CCC still copy everything that's copyable but the system would first have to be restored to the factory configuration via Apple's recovery procedure and then all the user files/settings migrated from the CCC backup. This is basically what I did when I recently got a new Mac Studio. I migrated the OS backup from my MBP and when it was all done, the Studio was effectively a clone of the MBP. Everything worked, including apps, passwords, mail, etc. Of course CCC can also be used to clone external drives from one to another, a folder on one drive to another drive, etc. And scheduled. It also has their SafetyNet feature, which if turned on, will move old file versions to a dedicated folder, rather than overwriting them, to allow recovery, if needed. And it can automatically 'prune' those older file versions. One thing to take note of, if the destination drive is APFS formatted, CCC will automatically also make snapshots. But these can accumulate over time and consume a fair amount of storage. It might be a worthwhile option for an OS backup but I've disabled it for all my external drive backups.
chas wrote:
Does anyone know of:
1: A backup application that runs on a Mac that would do scheduled backups.
2: The method used in a Mac environment for attaching a NAS drive to a Mac in the same way that one may be attached to a Windows-based desktop?
1. All Macs come with the Time Machine application from Apple. You can access it via the prefs panel on any modern Mac. I will automatically back up the computer hourly (or at other intervals you can choose) to an attached drive or to a network drive. The backups maintain the states of the drive at ALL of the times it was backed up. So if, for example, you need a certain file in the form it was in on July 3 you can get that… or the version on July 4… or the version from yesterday at 1:00PM.
There are a number of other backup apps on Mac. Two standbys are Carbonto Copy Cloner and SuperDuper!. (Yes, the “!” is part of the name. They offer some different features than the Mac-native Time Machine that may be useful.
2. There’s really nothing different about backing up to a NAS on a Mac. I think you might have look up the particular mode of accessing it over the network (I’ll leave that to you) but once you set it up it just runs.
- - -
I am a paranoid backer-upper. As everyone should be. Here’s what I do.
1. My photography files are stored on an attached drive.
2. My Time Machine backup executes every hour and automatically backs up to another drive on my local network. (It is attached to a file server Mac mini located elsewhere on site.)
2. Once per day, at something like 1:00AM, a “SuperDuper” backup executes to a drive attached to the computer.
3. Once per week a second “SuperDuper” backup executes to a separate drive. That drive is for offsite storage and is periodically swapped with another drive that is used for offsite storage.
4. When I travel I carry a backup of all of my Photoshop files on a portable drive.
One more thing. Be sure to connect the primary drive (as in #1 above) to the fastest Thunderbolt port available. For backup drives, if you have enough Thunderbolt ports you could use them, too, though your drives may be more costly than using USB drives. Backing up via slower USB drives and connections is not necessarily a problem since you can schedule those backups for times when the computer is otherwise idle.
Lots of great advice here. I will be working on this over the next few weeks. I am not entirely sure what final configuration we will land on, as that will depend on my daughter-in-laws needs, but I will probably be reaching out for some more specific advice as I move forward. Thank you for all of the good advice and encouragement. It is greatly appreciated.
chas wrote:
Lots of great advice here. I will be working on this over the next few weeks. I am not entirely sure what final configuration we will land on, as that will depend on my daughter-in-laws needs, but I will probably be reaching out for some more specific advice as I move forward. Thank you for all of the good advice and encouragement. It is greatly appreciated.
Chas
Just for posterity. I gave up all my NAS and RAID devices. I now store all of my images on a large, single, SIMPLE spinner in a simple USB3 box. I have a second identical as mirrored onsite back-up. I have a 3rd identical stored offsite and backed up after any larger shoot and/or at least monthly. I use Carbon Copy Cloner, aka CCC, to schedule the onsite mirror every 2 hours between 8:30 and 4:30. The offsite drive is auto scheduled with CCC to backup whenever connected to the system. Finally, I have a TV4 NVME drive that I keep the current year or so of my working images on. This backs up with CCC every hour between 8 and 4 to the primary spinning drive. In this I have super fast I/O for all current images, and then double redundancy of my entire image library. And even the usb spinners aren’t uncomfortably slow when I want to re-work some legacy images. Of course I could always copy whatever legacy folder back to the desktop if I needed speed. 1) inexpensive in total and 2) really easy to rebuild any failed drive.
PS: I only use Time Machine for my OS backup and keep this on an older 4TB spinner USB3. A little slow if you need to rebuild from it, but since my MacBook Pro and Studio have identical software set-ups, I can rebuild either from the other; or transfer to a new machine from either via the TB port to TB port direct connection. The TB to TB port is really fast to rebuild an entire OS plus software, like 15 minutes.
