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Post by secretsquirrel on Feb 11, 2022 23:16:42 GMT -6
So I'm looking for an external backup HDD for the Mac Mini I'm getting ready to buy. I read this thread hoping to see a bunch of recommendations for hard drives, but it ended up mostly being about cloud based backup. It's definitely inspired me to try the Backblaze thing as a redundant backup, but I still need an external drive for using with Timeline as a physical, onsite backup. I think I'd like 4 or 5 TB, preferably with a USB-C connection. A spinner HDD would be fine for these duties. 7200 would be nice over 5400, so that it backups a little faster, but I suppose that isn't a must have requirement. So what specific models are you guys using for Macs these days? I use a Seagate Firecuda dock w/ my mac mini. Added a 1TB Samsung 980 NVMe stick to the 4TB HDD. I picked it up during the cyber week sales because in addition to a backup drive I also needed more ports. The HDD is used for backups (via TimeMachine) and I'm using the NVMe stick for sample libs. Connects via USB-C. The only downsides are an internal fan... which kicks in when the 4TB HDD is accessed... but it's otherwise silent. Since this was originally targeted at the gamer market it has some glowing LEDs that can be distracting. Also it seems to be discontinued so it might be tricky to find in stock... but I really like mine.
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Post by drumsound on Feb 12, 2022 0:53:19 GMT -6
Projects from my external recording drive get duplicated to my system drive, which is backed up to a drive that leaves with me.
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Post by Quint on Apr 25, 2022 13:06:37 GMT -6
@johnkenn, One issue I ran into with Backblaze this year was that my data storage was so HUGE (it seemed to be backing up everything and even keeping erased files) that there was some type of "directory" of sorts (as I understood it) which was bloating my internal apps/os-only drive. I ended up pulling down EVERYTHING I wanted from the Backblaze cloud and then quit that old plan and started a brand new subscription plan. All in all, it took me about 10 days to do this, but since it was mostly "running in the background" while I worked, my active involvement was perhaps only 3-4 hours over that period of time. It's been so long since I signed up for Backblaze, I had to just now go up and see what "B2" meant... No, I just did the "FREE" download when restoring. I imagine, I'll probably want to restart a new subscription every couple of years now just to make sure I don't get bloated data taking up space on my internal OS/Apps drive. That's the ONLY issue I've noted with Backblaze. Otherwise, it's "set it, and forget it." Chad What made you choose the "free download" (as you put it) version over the B2? I've been looking at both options and I'm not sure which to go with. Also, I need to think about Backblaze a bit more, because I'd like to avoid the problems you mentioned, if possible.
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Post by Quint on Apr 25, 2022 13:14:32 GMT -6
So Drew over at the UA forum posted this: "I've not tried this myself, apparently Chronosync does it.
www.econtechnologies.com/pr/030422.html
To be honest, now that Time Machine does APFS, it's CRAZY fast. So a TM backup and your Recovery partition may have rendered bootable clones obsolete?? IOW, reinstalling from Recovery and then a TM restore is the new way???
I have no idea if this is all going to work as I am still on Catalina on my work machine. But on my M1 MBP this looks to be a viable new way."I'm not sure if I follow what Drew is saying, but has anybody tried this? I'm asking because I was thinking about just manually cloning my OS drive every so often, but it sounds like, in addition to doing traditional backups of data, Chronosync can now also somehow or another provide a bootable clone as part of it's services? If so, maybe I wouldn't have to fool with manually doing an OS clone every now and then.
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Post by Quint on Apr 25, 2022 13:16:49 GMT -6
Anybody used this for a backup drive?: OWC MERCURY ELITE PRO eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/ME3NH7T08/I was thinking about getting this enclosure with one of the 8tb internal HDDs (I believe they're Toshiba) they sell as part of a package deal with the enclosure.
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Post by the other mark williams on Apr 25, 2022 13:47:42 GMT -6
Anybody used this for a backup drive?: eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/ME3NH7T08/I was thinking about getting this enclosure with one of the 8tb internal HDDs (I believe they're Toshiba) they sell as part of a package deal with the enclosure. Yeah, I've had a bunch of those enclosures over the years, and literally have a stack of 4 of them plugged in to my system right now. - 1 is a clone of my main system drive
- 1 is clone of my music recording drive
- 1 is an archive of this year's video projects
- 1 is a clone of the archive of this year's video projects
All of my working drives for current video projects are SSDs (mostly Samsung T5s), and my main music recording drive is also an SSD (an OWC SSD in a similar but smaller enclosure to the one you posted).
I use ChronoSync for the smart cloning process (I use "mirroring" mode, left-to-right).
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Post by Quint on Apr 25, 2022 16:28:52 GMT -6
Anybody used this for a backup drive?: eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/ME3NH7T08/I was thinking about getting this enclosure with one of the 8tb internal HDDs (I believe they're Toshiba) they sell as part of a package deal with the enclosure. Yeah, I've had a bunch of those enclosures over the years, and literally have a stack of 4 of them plugged in to my system right now. - 1 is a clone of my main system drive
- 1 is clone of my music recording drive
- 1 is an archive of this year's video projects
- 1 is a clone of the archive of this year's video projects
All of my working drives for current video projects are SSDs (mostly Samsung T5s), and my main music recording drive is also an SSD (an OWC SSD in a similar but smaller enclosure to the one you posted).
I use ChronoSync for the smart cloning process (I use "mirroring" mode, left-to-right).
Ok. I was already leaning this way anyway. Your post convinced me. I went ahead and ordered the 8tb version. Now I just gotta figure out partitioning, to the extent that I'm going to do any of that, and also take a look at Chronosync, BackBlaze, Time Machine etc. to figure out my cloud based backups. I've never done the cloud thing before, so this is a new one for me.
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Post by sirthought on Apr 25, 2022 21:54:19 GMT -6
Anybody used this for a backup drive?: OWC MERCURY ELITE PRO eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/ME3NH7T08/I was thinking about getting this enclosure with one of the 8tb internal HDDs (I believe they're Toshiba) they sell as part of a package deal with the enclosure. One story of caution about partitioning a spinner versus a SSD. I don't know if my experience is unique or not. I had a 4 TB drive I sectioned into four drives: Audio Production Archive; Mac backup; Photo Archive; and the last one was my personal music and video collection, which I'd use as a media streamer. This partition got a lot of use. The drive failed at some point. I was able to save some stuff, but not everything. Hard to say why it may have corrupted, as it was only about 1.5-2 years old, but I'm guessing the media streamer partition was what broke down. It was running that mechanical disc for hours at a time everyday. I forget now if it was a WD or a Seagate, but it was a model that had great reviews and was quite popular. I suspect had I been doing the streaming from an SSD or a different drive, my other stuff on the HDD would still be there today.
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Post by Quint on Apr 26, 2022 4:42:48 GMT -6
Anybody used this for a backup drive?: OWC MERCURY ELITE PRO eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/ME3NH7T08/I was thinking about getting this enclosure with one of the 8tb internal HDDs (I believe they're Toshiba) they sell as part of a package deal with the enclosure. One story of caution about partitioning a spinner versus a SSD. I don't know if my experience is unique or not. I had a 4 TB drive I sectioned into four drives: Audio Production Archive; Mac backup; Photo Archive; and the last one was my personal music and video collection, which I'd use as a media streamer. This partition got a lot of use. The drive failed at some point. I was able to save some stuff, but not everything. Hard to say why it may have corrupted, as it was only about 1.5-2 years old, but I'm guessing the media streamer partition was what broke down. It was running that mechanical disc for hours at a time everyday. I forget now if it was a WD or a Seagate, but it was a model that had great reviews and was quite popular. I suspect had I been doing the streaming from an SSD or a different drive, my other stuff on the HDD would still be there today. That won't be a concern for me. All of my drives are for one type of use. Sample drive is just for samples. Audio drive is just for audio. So on and so forth. They are also all SSDs anyway, other than the backup drive, so a lot of this will be moot for my situation. The only partitioning I might be doing would be to split certain drives up into smaller chunks, but still for the same kind of data, purely for organizational purposes, and I'm not even sure I'll be doing that. Partitioning isn't strictly necessary with SSDs these days, in the way that it was with HDDs, at least as I understand it. I'm happy to be proven wrong about that though, if there's a good reason I should be doing some partitioning.
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