Re: Insomniacal Mac

On 2024-06-11 16:40, Your Name wrote:

On 2024-06-11 12:15:44 +0000, Alan Browne said:
 

On 2024-06-11 00:48, Your Name wrote:
>

I've never bothered with Time Machine either. It's methodology seems to be a ridiculous waste of drive space backing up mutiple versions of the same document. I don't use Versions either and always delete the old ones if using an app like Pages that insists on doing that silliness.

>
Following the initial backup, succeeding backups are differences only (changed files and new files), so it's a very slow accumulation.  Once the backup volume is near full, oldest redundant backups are removed.

 Which, for those who want such a feature, partly defeats the purpose of copying those old versions in the first place. When they want to retrieve it, it could well be gone.

My older iMac TM volume is nowhere close to full after about 6 years.
It's not much of an issue.  If there is a version of a file I really need to freeze, I'll make sure it is standalone.

I use CarbonCopyCloner to backup manually when I want to. The only problem with it it that it is quite slow at working out what to copy. If I've only changed a few documents, it still takes nearly an hour to trawl through the entire drive before copying just those few altered / new files. There was also a problem at one stage where it would hang during that phase of working out what to copy and eventually stop with an error, but updating to a slightly newer version seems to have fixed that.

>
Time Machine does not have this issue. Note you can install s/w that will run TM at a reduced pace (you turn off automatic TM updates and let the scheduler s/w invoke TM) - this also addresses your issue above to some degree.

 For me Time Machine is a useless waste of time. That's why I turn if off and chose to use CCC instead.

TM is my "live" backup.
I also maintain offline static backups of important stuff.
For my business the backup scheme is more elaborate and in depth - the goal being that despite the worst possible disaster front and back office can be up and running w/i 24 business hours (including the acquisition of hardware).
--
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  the culture and independence of the ancient States of Europe."
Winston Churchill