chas wrote: 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.
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
Apparently some of the cloud backup options are also very 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.
Aug 06, 2025 at 11:36 PM
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