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Carbon Copy Cloner vs Time Machine: best backup software for Mac


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7 hours ago, wgscott said:

For things like music files, where versioning isn't necessarily a good idea, a simple rsync backup is free and easy.

 

Not true. I've discovered music files missing in my iTunes/Music library at times, so going back in Time Machine means that I can recover them.

I write about Macs, music, and more at Kirkville.

Author of Take Control of macOS Media Apps

Co-host of The Next Track podcast.

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11 minutes ago, Bob Stern said:

 

Have you done a Spotlight search for the file when that happens?  I've never found a music file to disappear, but iTunes often claims a music file is missing when the file actually exists but iTunes somehow loses track of it.  

 

(I'm chagrined Apple doesn’t store a unique identifier tag in each music file to enable iTunes to always find it.)

 

Yes, these are files that have simply disappeared. It happens a dozen or so times a year; I don't know why, I certainly don't mess around with the files themselves. 

I write about Macs, music, and more at Kirkville.

Author of Take Control of macOS Media Apps

Co-host of The Next Track podcast.

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No, that's not correct. That's the case for multiple computers being backed up to a remote computer, not for volumes. I have three volumes on my iMac that are all backed up to one normal folder on an external drive. 

 

And I disagree with the recommendation to make a sparse image. Disk images can be corrupted, as you have probably seen over time with Time Machine. Better to copy the files to a normal volume. 

 

And regarding partitioning, with APFS (macOS Catalina or later) you no longer need to worry about specifying volume size. As Apple says (https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/disk-utility/dskua9e6a110/mac😞

 

Quote

Apple File System (APFS) allocates disk space on demand. When a single APFS container (partition) has multiple volumes, the container’s free space is shared and can be allocated to any of the individual volumes as needed. Each volume uses only part of the overall container, so the available space is the total size of the container, minus the size of all volumes in the container.

 

I write about Macs, music, and more at Kirkville.

Author of Take Control of macOS Media Apps

Co-host of The Next Track podcast.

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  • 7 months later...

RAID is not a backup if it’s your primary storage device. RAID is helpful on backup devices, if only to duplicate your stuff. If you use software like Carbon Copy Cloner, you can set it to keep deleted files in a special folder so if a file is accidentally deleted, you syllabus have copies. 

I write about Macs, music, and more at Kirkville.

Author of Take Control of macOS Media Apps

Co-host of The Next Track podcast.

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Time Machine is bootable, if you don't exclude system files from backups. 

 

Pretty much all backup software only copies new or updated files, so the first backup is always quite long, and subsequent backups don't take too long. That's another reason why talking about RAID performance for backups makes no sense. 

I write about Macs, music, and more at Kirkville.

Author of Take Control of macOS Media Apps

Co-host of The Next Track podcast.

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