New Backup Plan (?)

Dateline, Sunday March 31st — Today is World Backup Day, in case you haven't already guessed the reason for the recent topics. (Also because I got a stonkin' new Mac Mini which is awesome, brilliant, slick and fast.) I'd link to WorldBackupDay.com, but they're probably getting slammed, because the site has not been responding for a while. Maybe they took World Bandwidth Day off to go to the beach. —Mike

So here's the backup solution I've decided on...as of, um, this minute. See if you approve. I'm not too slick on this stuff. (Warning: I do not think this is a very interesting post. You might want to treat World Backup Day as a holiday.)

This is the second time I've tried to get serious about backup. The last time I was helped by a well-timed boot in the rear from Bill Tyler. That was back in February of '18, which, as Peggy C. noted, was the last time we talked about this subject. Back then, Bill challenged me to sign up for Backblaze before sundown, and I did.

Here's the latest plan. See if ya folla.

1. My Mac Mini has a 512k SSD. That drive holds everything except photos and music.
2. The Mini's SSD drive will be backed up to my Time Capsule router as usual, via Time Machine. (Time Machine is the name of the automatic backup software that comes with every Mac. The AirPort Time Capsule, which Apple no longer makes, is a wireless router that includes a hard drive or hard drives for...well, for backups via Time Machine.)
3. Next, I'll return the two new WD My Passport portable drives I got yesterday. No longer part o' the plan.
4. For the photos and music, I think I'll continue using my existing 2TB WD My Passport portable drive (which is named "Passport One"). I've already had one fail and I know they're not terrifically robust, but if one fails I'll just rotate another one in. I currently have two of the little portable drives, and new ones are cheap enough. (They're bus-powered and about the size of a pack of cards.)
5. A reader who wishes to remain anonymous donated (nice word for "gave me as a present") an AKiTiO Thunder2 Quad 4-bay storage enclosure he was no longer using. (Pretty nice.) His insight was that vibration reduction and proper cooling help hard drives live longer—the AKiTiO is solid and has a big low-speed fan in the back. He told me he had persistent problems with his hard drives until he stripped them out of their single enclosures and put them in the AKiTiO, at which point his problems stopped.
6. For the enclosure I got two slow (5400 RPM) 3.5" 4TB hard drives. I researched madly till late at night and ended up buying two of these from B&H Photo*. They were on sale for $84.99 each when I bought them.
7. With the two 3.5" drives, I've decided not to go with RAID 1, based on the advice I got here yesterday. Instead I'll take Rodolfo Canet and Trevor Johnson's advice and use Carbon Copy Cloner 5 (MacOS only. But it's on sale for World Backup Day! Twenty percent off) to back up the Passport One drive to each of the two drives in the AKiTiO every time I download a card. That way new shooting will exist in three places before I even remove the card from the slot.
8. The Mini and Passport One will both continue to be backed up to Backblaze as before.

So here's the upshot:

• Mac Mini: backed up on Time Capsule (kept on a shelf halfway down the basement stairs) and with Backblaze offsite backup.

• Passport One drive with all my photos and music on it: backed up on the two identical 3.5" drives in the AKiTiO and also on Backblaze.

So I'll have:

• Three copies of the boot drive disk—the original in the Mini plus one backup in the house and one in the Cloud.

• Four copies of the photos/music external drive—the one attached to the computer for everyday use, the two identical clones in the AKiTiO, and one in the Cloud.

So what say ye? Approve?

I know that some of you are probably going to say I need one more offsite disk, solemnly rotated in and out of a safety deposit box at the bank, but really, my photos aren't that great.  :-)

Mike

*By the way, best not to buy hard drives from Amazon. As you probably know they tend to stick things loose in a roomy box with a couple of symbolic air pillows thrown in. Not smart with hard drives not to use careful packing.

Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Want to help?

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Neil Swanson: "So I wonder, how long does it take to upload a 2TB drive to Backblaze or a similar service? It would take seemingly ages to go from drive to drive but to a 'Cloud'?"

Mike replies: Per Backblaze: "Ideally, Backblaze should be able to complete your initial backup within 30 days, and that’s OK. Be patient, especially if you have a lot of data. Backblaze will complete your initial backup as soon as possible." I think mine took about 10 days or two weeks, something in there. But it happens in the background, so it's not any hassle.

Bruce McL: "Nice backup plan. As a retired Mac IT guy I approve, with one addition. Buy one more drive for your enclosure. Have Carbon Copy Cloner make a clone of your system SSD to the new drive once a week, or have it update the clone every night if you want. Get a small capacity, fast, spinning 3.5" drive—1TB 7200rpm HDDs are cheap, under $50.00. I don't quite trust Time Machine to recover everything after a catastrophic failure of a system drive. It can work, but it's a messy process. With a CCC cloned drive it's easy. Plug the backup drive into any Mac. Go to System Preferences: Startup Disk and select the backup HD. After a restart, everything from the system drive will be there and will be functional. If your SSD suddenly died, you could be back at work in minutes."

Mike replies: Bruce, is there any risk of having all my local drives in one non-RAID enclosure? I thought last night that maybe I'll just streamline things and put the media on a separate drive in the enclosure, instead of on the 2TB My Passport portable. So I'd have four drives in the enclosure—one fast 2–4TB drive for media, the two slow 4TB drives for media backup, and the one you suggest, a 1TB fast drive with the backup of the System on it. 

William Whitaker: "So, today I have to drive everywhere in reverse?"

Mike replies: Don't get your back up.

Michael T.: "Whatever you end up doing it is important to test it from time to time. For example, see if you can boot your Mini from the two external backups. If not you need to understand why and remedy. Same with backups of your photos and music. It is also a good idea to occasionally run the repair function in disk utility on your backup drives. I run carbon copy and find it to be easy to use and quite robust. Good luck!"

Mike replies: CCC recommends that you restore several random files every now and then just to make sure everything's working smoothly. I'll also try to remember to learn how to boot from the backup once everything's set up.

Kev: "This has been a very useful topic, thanks Mike. I'm moving from a mini to the new MacBook Pro, and it’s changed things a bit in terms of storage and back up, so your thoughts are very timely. Also the commment made re. Time machine as a backup tool - I’ve always been a CCC guy, only had to use it once to recover from a borked main disk, and it was faultless and easy. Recent change of machine made me give time machine a go, and it has proved useful when I accidentaly wrote over a crucial file, but I think I'll follow advice and also ensure I have a weekly clone with CCC. Excellent stuff, and you explained it better then I could, as currently I have the plan sketched out on a piece of A4 paper as it was getting so complicated!"

Bill Poole: "Passport-style drives are not really adequate for continuous use. The drive gets too hot when run continuously. Heat shortens drive life and these drives are not specified for long life to begin with. They are good for clones that are off most of the time, and for data transfer. One option is to get a drive in a better case such as sold by OWC (available on Amazon). The better option these days for any external drive that will run continuously is the Samsung T5 line you mention in your subsequent post. The two clones should really be staggered in time, perhaps by a week. Otherwise you may find both clones and the cloned drive all have the same problem, perhaps something like ransomware. One of the clones should be offline, in a small Pelican box, in an ESD safe bag, with a desiccant. And it goes without saying that everything runs off a UPS."

Timo (partial comment): "As long as the system makes sense to you—and is something you do regularly—it seems fine. It mirrors my understanding of contemporary computer set ups: that is, one has a small, fast boot disk with the OS and programs, connected to larger but slower data storage, in our case photos, that use conventional Winchester drives. So each side of that Thunderbolt connection needs a back up strategy. But a few notes/tweaks:

1. On the boot side of things:

• I agree with others who think you should have a bootable clone of your Mini's internal drive. Carbon Copy Cloner (essentially a nice GUI wrapper for the UNIX 'rsync' command, but with customizations) is terrific for this. So one 'task' the left-hand pane would be a clone of your boot drive. I might suggest you spring for one of those Samsung SSDs on sale today. Plug it in, and schedule the task to run every night at 2 a.m. or so. Now you're really covered if the Mini's internal fails, and if you bought the SSD, the boot from the clone is fairly speedy (whereas a boot from a 5400 rpm external drive is painfully slow). Best of all, it's set and forget
• The first CCC clone takes awhile, but subsequent clones compare what files have changed and only copy the newer stuff, cutting back up times dramatically
• Keep using the Time Capsule and Time Machine, but think of this more as a system for recovering files accidentally deleted or corrupted. In back-up jargon this is 'versioning,' and it's nice to be able to 'go back' and fetch something from before a user-error. However, whole system restores from Time Capsule back ups are flakey and/or time-consuming enough to not be worth it, except as a fallback, in my opinion

2. On the data side of things:

• I think you'll need a TB3 —> TB2 dongle to hook up that AKiTiO to your new Mini
• you will probably need to 'exclude' your new drives in the AKiTiO from your Time Capsule, or it will fill up prematurely (depending on how much data you have, of course)
• the Thunderbolt 'pipe' between your new 5400 drives and the Mini is really fast, such that the drive platter speed in your new drives will be the limiting factor in terms of speed
• I personally find the copy-to-two-drives a bit of overkill for one problem (drive failure) but less-than-ideal with regards to human error. I might change the copying such that one of your new WDs is a copy of the passport photo/music drive, and the other WD is a trailing copy—something only done weekly. (And one can use CCC to schedule this weekly copy.) So, if you muck up something on your music/photo drive, and inadvertently (or automatically) copy that muck-up to one AKiTiO back up, you still have an older version to recover a file or three from.
• I learned from kind of crazy Reddit threads about 'shucking'—essentially buying cheapish Best-Buy-branded external hard drives, and 'shucking' them out of their enclosures in order to use the drive inside in your own enclosure. The advantage is cost, and, as your benefactor who put drives in his AKiTiO noted, it's also good not to have to rely on the commodity-price drive controller bundled with the external drives on sale. At any rate these drives in external enclosures often go on sale for prices one-half or less of bare drives (but also with less warranty)."

DavidB: "Take Control of Backing Up Your Mac, Third Edition.

"It examines a variety of strategies, programs, and hardware for cloning and archival. Worth the $15 price."

Mike replies: I just read the sample—I especially like that he "took control" of his Take Control books from the original publisher, as recounted in the "Read Me First" section.  :-)

John Camp: "I've often wondered why people need such huge-capacity drives. I know there must be a reason, I just don't know what it is. A 1TB drive like the one you illustrated could hold (I think, I may be wrong, I'm not a numbers savant) up to something like 13,000 uncompressed raw photos from my GX8's. Yet Geoff needs a 2TB drive! To me, that's inconceivable. On a full 2TB drive, If I looked at each of my GX8 photos for ten seconds each (and if I had that many) it'd take me virtually two entire work weeks just to page through them. That's a lot of #@$%! photos."

Ken Tanaka: "In answer to John Camp’s puzzlement over why hard drives have reached, and exceeded, such enormous capacities the answer is simple: VIDEO. The incorporation of cinema-class 4K video facilities into still cameras has mandated lightning-speed cavernous memory cards and these ginormous tiny portable drives. Certainly, larger still image file sizes also contributed to this trend but not with the force that video-in-still-cameras did. Video is also responsible for increasing the complexity of camera menu systems, a recent complaint campaign here."

Mike replies: I also think that 2TB isn't all that much. Take John's figure of 13,000 photos per terabyte, Geoff's 2TB drive, and Geoff's statement that he has 25 years' worth of digital images archived on one drive. As I do the arithmetic (never my strong suit, n.b.), 26,000 photos over 25 years is close enough to 1,000 photos a year, and with two weeks for giving it a rest (and making the arithmetic simpler) that's only 20 photos a week. I'm a light shooter but I don't think I've ever shot less than 20 exposures when I go out to photograph with a digital camera in my hand. I'll do that much just to warm up.

I have about 80,000 Plus-X, Tri-X, and P3200 35mm negatives from my younger days. Granted, I keep everything, even the rankest junk, because of the way negatives are filed and stored. But that was all done between 1980 and 2000. So that's 1,040 weeks, meaning I shot an average of just under 77 pictures a week during those decades, which is, in turn, just over two rolls of film per week. That's not very much at all.

Comments

[Bill Tyler]

I'm not sure exactly how CarbonCopyCloner works, but here's a possible glitch. Suppose that CCC tries to make both your local backup disks exact copies of Passport One. If there's been any file corruption on PP1, that corruption will then be faithfully replicated to the two backups. I don't know whether there's a commercial solution available, but with three copies of most files, it would be really a good idea to do a three-way comparison of everything to look for corruption, since any of the three copies could have become corrupt over time.

[Ian Goodrick]

Just recovering from the crash of the hard disk on my laptop.

No loss of any pictures as they were all backed up on external drives.

What the crash has thrown up is that after a clean install of High Sierra on to a new SSD my copy of Lightroom 4 is unstable to the point of being unusable. Strangely I had no problem before the crash.
Not really wanting to pay subscription for CC I am now looking at other programs.

Currently for my data I have 2x 4TB drives with everything on them. Not set up as a raid but manually backed up every day or so. I also have 2x 2TB drives that I filled last year. These are now kept off site. Then a 1TB portable drive. This has all my new work in the past year, and backed up to at the same time as my 2x4TB drives. giving 3 copies of everything and 4 of some.

Planning to add some more drives and programmes as per your post.

[Christer]

I had two "Passport" external discs fail within a few days some weeks ago. Luckily enough I had three back-ups, but I got a bit nervous.

SSDs have recently gotten less pricey and I now have all my back-ups on SSDs. No moving parts, and they are sooo small.

(Before my Passports failed, they got slightly more noisy and my MacBook Pro ejected them without me asking for it. Look out for these signs if you use Passports.)

[Rfeg]

Hi Mike,
Nice plan. Be sure that your Akitio box is in a UPS. I know it's not as fast, but having a NAS makes it easy to have another UPS. If your circuit breaker breaks or you have a power outage UPS will save your day.
Regards, rfeg

[It's curious that we think of digital as EASIER. --Mike]

[Carl]

Now you have a backup plan can I ask, do you have a Restore Plan?

[Speed]

What happens if the Mac Mini stops working? Are you out of business until it is repaired or replaced?

I used to have two computers -- a desktop and a laptop -- that were more or less interchangeable. They had the same software and all files less than a year old were on both computers. One breaks and I'm still in business.

A couple of years ago I bought a super-zoomie laptop with the objective of making it my only computer. The desktop stayed in place, though turned off, for a year before I finally moved it to the basement. With all of this "what if" conversation I'm wondering if I should turn the old desktop on and refresh all the files and applications … just in case.

(I have on-site and off-site backups for all my files independent of the computers)

[Speed]

Single point of failure …

Then the panic ... The two missing bags were carry-ons …

One bag contained my computer, along with two cameras and about eight hundred dollars in foreign currency. My work files were backed up on Dropbox, but I had never been able to synch my photos and videos, because of some problem with our Internet. So I had copied everything twice onto portable hard drives. Leslie had recently made two long research trips, filling a set of notebooks with material for the book about Egypt that she planned to write. Usually, she would have transcribed her notes immediately, but things had been too hectic. I had packed the backup drives and the notebooks in the second carry-on, so that they would be separate from the computer.

First carry-on, second carry-on—it made no difference now.

The Refugee and the Thief.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/01/egyptian-refugee

[Grant]

Approve. Sanity returns to TOP. Glad the TOP geeks provided such sage advice, because I too have RAID stories. I also have a great SCSI story if you can remember that far back. I won't relate it, it's not for the squeamish.

[Eric Perlberg]

Sounds good to me. I use SuperDuper instead of Carbon Copy Cloner but from what I’ve read they’re interchangeable. It sounds like your data is well backed up. My only suggestion, if you haven’t already done this, is that you set up at least one backup drive as a bootable drive with your applications, so that should something happen to your ssd in the Mini that you can still start up and use your Mini.

I don’t see the point in an independent drive rotated and kept off site as BackBlaze solves that problem.

[Daniel]

Still do the top images on DVD, soon to be BluRay disks as well as Hard Drive backups.
Reason is the DVD/BluRay disks are not wiped out by a major solar storm - such as the Carrington Event from the 1850's. Yes, a big storm or EMP will wipe out all the machinery but when we rebuild I'll still have the images on the disks.

So far the Delkin Gold disks are looking good as I review the oldest I have.

[MikeR]

Seems like you're covered. I do some of the same sorts of things, just in the Windows world.

Back in my early corporate IT career, I got bit by a backup that wasn't. Unknown until I needed to do a restore. Back then, mainframes were more than just IBM. RCA, Univac, Burroughs, GE, Honeywell, NCR, and one more that I don't recall the name of. IBM and the Seven Dwarfs.

Every OS had it's own language. I misinterpreted the system backup report.

[Peter Wright]

Sounds like a good and easy to manage solution! Having a bootable clone in the enclosure is also a good way to mitigate SSD failure. However, I wouldn't go the extra step and put your 'passport 1' data in a fourth drive in the enclosure. If the enclosure electronics (including the power supply) were to fail, you would have access to nothing in the enclosure, until a new and compatible enclosure could be delivered.

[SteveW]

All bases covered!

We all have our own particular risk exposure ratio.

Solid solution.

[Chip McDaniel]

Did you read Backblaze's privacy policy? Here is a quote of part of it:

We may share and disclose your personally identifiable information only in the limited circumstances described below:

To vendors and other third party service providers who require access to your personal information to assist in providing and improving our products. The third parties that access and use your information only on our behalf include companies such as Stripe, Salesforce, Google Analytics, Freshbooks, Facebook, Twitter, Hubspot, MailChimp, Plivo, Slack, SurveyMonkey, SendGrid, Twillio, and ZenDesk. For example, we partner with Stripe and Freshbooks to assist us in processing your payment; Hubspot enables us to send you marketing emails, subject to your preferences; SendGrid is used to communicate service emails to you; Twillio and Plivo are used to send SMS messages to you when you use our 2-factor authentication feature; and Zendesk is used to facilitate our customer support and online Chat service.

Unless I am not understanding something here, that makes Backblaze a nonstarter for me.

[MHMG]

Mike, one minor detail! If you are making a disaster recovery plan for yourself only, its looks to me like you've done good. However, if you want to pass any digital assets on to the next generation, you need to make it part of your estate planning. That means identifying your heir(s), giving them a hard copy of all your computer passwords (what good are functional drives if they are encrypted and nobody knows the password?), writing out an index explaining your digital collection's organizational structure, and most importantly offering personal guidance to your heirs on what it all means.

BTW, physical prints of my favorite images are a key part of my personal collection to be handed down to children, and their significance is usually easy for even strangers to assess, but computer records? Oh boy. I think that's a big can of worms, but as discussed above, unless you wish to go the route of Bret Weston and burn your camera originals before you die, then giving at least a little guidance to your family and friends should be an important consideration in one's digital archiving endeavors

[Sixblockseast]

Mike, what I'd really love to see here is more of your photos! How important is all this backing up (or printing for that matter) if we hardly ever get to see them?

[Kenneth Tanaka]

Backup plans are only as good as they are followed and executable.

1. Create a SIMPLE plan you will REALLY follow indefinitely with rabid devotion.

2. Always ensure the integrity of the source material. It’s common to have someone backing-up corrupted file systems ad nauseum, only to discover it months too late. The fact is that logical corruption is going to be the most likely data “disaster” you’ll encounter these days.

3. Drill a full recovery before you’re completely committed and BEFORE you need to recover.

[Dave Van de Mark]

Mike, Backing up is such a "personal" endeavor that we pursue our own way, often without a solid ability to explain why we did it one way or the other. But basically I feel you've done well.

Some reservations are based a little in not knowing some details. I find it important to also have a "boot" backup - a drive containing a copy of what's on the internal SSD and which can boot in replace of the internal drive if it were to fail. I don't know if "Time Machine" does that - if so you are covered there. You imply the contents of your internal drive are backed up but one needs to be bootable. In my previous iMac, I had a failure and simply rolled the external boot drive back onto the replacement. Until I could do that, the external boot drive acted as the main drive for a couple days.

You choose to use a USB drive (C or 3, you don't say) as your "first" file access point, if I understand you correctly. Thunderbolt is way faster, so why not use one of the two 3-1/2" 4TB drives in your "gift" enclosure as the "main" drive - then backup to the other 4TB and to the Passport. The Passport could also be an "off-campus" backup. You are now using an on-line system for that - good luck but I just can't solidly feel good about on-line backups just yet, and death may come first before I do :-)

FYI, I am using Chronosync as my backup software and find it excellent. That is not a statement regarding Carbon Copy, of which I've heard good things.

[Robert Johnston]

Just go back to film, it's simpler! Only half joking.

[c.d.embrey]

Paranoia knows no bounds! For a few bucks more you can buy a low capacity thumb-drive for macOS Recovery. Down-load Recovery from your Mac for FREE.

"macOS Recovery is part of the built-in recovery system of your Mac. You can start up from macOS Recovery and use its utilities to recover from certain software issues or take other actions on your Mac." https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201314

[Vince]

As others have noted…

• Boot Disk and misc personal data


• Locally (in-house)


1. One Time Machine backup


2. At least one clone (CCC or SuperDuper!)


• Offsite on a disk you own and control


1. At least one clone.


• Photos
  
  • Locally (in-house)
  
  
  1. At least one clone
  
  
  • Offsite on a disk you own and control
  
  
  1. At least one clone
  
  

If you want to use cloud as a third copy, that's fine, but it does not satisfy the offsite clone requirement by itself. This is for the simple reason that cloud="someone else's computer", and that someone else can have bad backup practices themselves (see where MySpace lost all data prior to 2015? ALL DATA prior to 2015), can have bad management (unexpectedly OOB), can have bad access (can't get to backup when you need it), and so forth. (Note that bad access could apply to you as well — if your internet is down when you need your offsite backup, e.g. after a bad weather event, then you can't get to your data when you need it.) They can also have bad privacy policies or bad security policies, and your data can end up places you don't want it to be.

In short, nothing about a cloud is under your control, and that makes for a bad backup plan.

(Totally off-topic, your ul/ol CSS is awfully white-spacey, it could use some tightening up IMO. I know, priorities, etc. :) )

[John]

Not sure about CCC, but some of these backup programs (including BackBlaze) copy the changes you made to your main drives. This means that if you mess up the files on your main drives without noticing it, after a while they’re also gone on your backup drives.

[c.d.embrey]

Thinking out of the box. A road less traveled (a choice that leads one in a different direction than most people) is often the best choice. No need to be a lemming, there are many ways to skin-a-cat.

As a minimalist I'm always looking for ways to do more with less. So here is My latest harebrained idea 8-) Getting rid of my macOS computer, and replacing it with iOS devices. Every thing I need on an iPhone, iPod Touch and an iPad Pro. Using iCloud for syncing and storage, plus maybe a portable SSD.

Here's what I have installed on my iPhone Xs: LumaFusion (video editing), Kindle (reader), Radio Paradise (internet radio), iMPC Pro 2 (music making), iA Writer, and Pixelmator (image editing). All of preceding will also work on an iPad Pro. iPad only are Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo and Garage Band.

[Jeroen Pulles]

Just a side note: do not confuse backup with archiving. Backups help you stay operational. No one is able to read a computer backup after twenty years. For most photography work, archiving is what counts. So don't forget those prints and film negatives!

And: do not think for a minute that having "raw" photo files means that anyone in the future will be able to cook images from that data. So keep those JPEG files around.

[Gord]

I believe this will help you find the way.
http://taobackup.com/index.html

Gord

[Timo]

As long as the system makes sense to you -- and is something you do regularly -- it seems fine. It mirrors my understanding of contemporary computer set ups: that is, one has a small, fast boot disk with the OS and programs, connected to larger but slower data storage, in our case photos, that use conventional Winchester drives. So each side of that thunderbolt connection needs a back up strategy. But a few notes/tweaks:

1. On the boot side of things:
• I agree with others who think you should have a bootable clone of your Mini's internal drive. Carbon Copy Cloner (essentially a nice GUI wrapper for the UNIX "rsync" command, but with customizations) is terrific for this. So one "task" the left-hand pane would be a clone of your boot drive. I might suggest you spring for one of those Samsung SSDs on sale today. Plug it in, and schedule the task to run every night at 2 am or so. Now you're really covered if the Mini's internal fails, and if you bought the SSD, the boot from the clone is fairly speedy (whereas a boot from a 5400 rpm external drive is painfully slow). Best of all, it's set and forget
• The first CCC clone takes awhile, but subsequent clones compare what files have changed and only copy the newer stuff, cutting back up times dramatically
• Keep using the Time Capsule and Time Machine, but think of this more as a system for recovering files accidentally deleted or corrupted. In back-up jargon this is "versioning," and it's nice to be able to "go back" and fetch something from before a user-error. However, whole system restores from Time Capsule back ups are flakey and/or time-consuming enough to not be worth it, except as a fallback, in my opinion

2. On the data side of things:
• I think you'll need a TB3 --> TB2 dongle to hook up that AKiTiO to your new Mini
• you will probably need to "exclude" your new drives in the AKiTiO from your Time Capsule, or it will fill up prematurely (depending on how much data you have, of course)
• the thunderbolt "pipe" between your new 5400 drives and the Mini is really fast, such that the drive platter speed in your new drives will be the limiting factor in terms of speed
• I personally find the copy-to-two-drives a bit of overkill for one problem (drive failure) but less-than-ideal with regards to human error. I might change the copying such that one of your new WDs is a copy of the passport photo/music drive, and the other WD is a trailing copy -- something only done weekly. (And one can use CCC to schedule this weekly copy.) So, if you muck up something on your music/photo drive, and inadvertently (or automatically) copy that muck-up to one AKiTiO back up, you still have an older version to recover a file or three from.
• I learned from kind of crazy reddit threads about "shucking" -- essentially buying cheapish Best Buy-branded external hard drives, and "shucking" them out of their enclosures in order to use the drive inside in your own enclosure. The advantage is cost, and, as your benefactor who put drives in his AKiTiO noted, it's also good not to have to rely on the commodity-price drive controller bundled with the external drives on sale. At any rate these drives in external enclosures often go on sale for prices 1/2 or less of bare drives (but also with less warranty.)

***

I have enough data that I like to RAID-together disks. In one instance I use two AKiTiO boxes, with four drives each, RAID'd together using SoftRAID, a great-if-pricey utility. I get three benefits: first, the space for my files is just one volume, which simplifies my back up routine. Second, the slowness of individual drives is greatly mitigated in a RAID scenario, such that 8 slow drives start to function at speeds like an SSD over USB. Finally SoftRAID keeps watch over drive health, though of course there are other utilities that do something similar. And Backblaze is happy enough to upload the RAID enclosure contents since they are directly attached to my mac (of course, recovering that amount of data from Backblaze is another question, but it is really a last line for me, as I keep a backup of everything offsite.)

It's a little complicated in terms of wires, but conceptually the idea stays with the simple arrangement of boot data on one side of the wire, and user data on the other, with in turn each data set backed up (as versions and/or clones), as appropriate.

[Frank Figlozzi]

To MikeR: I'm pretty sure that seventh dwarf was Control Data. (Remember CDC?)

Sometimes it pays to be an old geezer.

Frank

[Oskar Ojala]

Seems reasonable, but I'm always a bit suspicious of USB portable drives. I'd consider using your enclosure as the primary drive and portable USB drives for cold backups. These would need to be plugged in only for the backups and then plugged off.

One advantage with enclosures and drives over any kind of ready-made boxed setup is that if the controller of the enclosure dies, it's pretty straightforward to plug the drive into anything else. With prepackaged portable drives who know before actually trying it.

[David Dyer-Bennet]

I wouldn't have my primary local copy stored without redundancy. And look at what the time and cost on full-disk restoration is. I'm also afraid of forests of external drives; I've seen too many people buried in them (yes, I do see that your plan does not call for a forest).

[Michael Perini]

Mike, Your 'NEW' plan sounds MUCH better.
There is Lots of very good information in the comments.

I would reinforce points made in several excellent comments:
Keep it as simple as you can so that it doesn't become onerous over time.
Don't save money on cheap hard drives like passports because cheap controllers and hot plastic cases increase risk of failure.
Metal drive enclosures with premium chipsets and fans to keep drives cool really works.
Same goes for your computer, good air flow and passive cooling help.
Many companies make laptop 'trays' out of aluminum which acts as an additional heat sink .

5400 Rpm drives will be a bottleneck
Make a plan to replace spinning drives with SSD's over time.

Good luck

Carbon Copy Cloner is great and works just as advertised, and a local clone will save you from a VERY long download from Backblaze. (PS their privacy policy scares me too)

[c.d.embrey]

This ain't rocket science, it's more akin to brain surgery 8-) As one of my MDs says: medicine is as much art as science.

You can use any external drive as a startup disk from which to install the Mac operating system. A thumb-drive, a portable SSD, a CD, whatever https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201372

There are several cloud services that won't lose your info. Amazon, Apple, Google. Steal it maybe, lose it never.

CSS is personal. Live Modern isn't in Mike's vocabulary. Consistency is. Whatever floats his boat—his choice, not ours.

[Dennis Ng]

Unless you have offline (and possibly offsite) backup, you DO NOT HAVE backup. Check Ransomware.

Unless you have accessed those backup to confirm they are accessible, you also DO NOT HAVE backup. Check Toy story II.

It would hit you one day. It is not if but when.

[Guy Toner]

For those of us with PCs, is there an alternative to CCC?

[Robert Ardinger]

Two unexpected “issues” with the Mac Mini.

Just setting up a new Mac Mini (2018) as a replacement for my finally too old MacPro (early 2008). I used drives from the MacPro in external cases for photograph file storage, Mac mini’s SSD holds everything else. I back up locally to separate drives (copied with Super Duper) and made a couple of “bootable” copies of the Mac mini SSD. (My off Site backUp is to an existing iDrive account).

The first “issue” is new to me and involves the use of an external boot drive. My MacPro stopped being upgradeable at OS El Capitan but it was always able to start from an external drive if I wanted it to (holding down the option key on startup). Other Macs with OS up to High Sierra also acted the same way. I periodically test the boot drive copy to be sure it can act as a functional boot drive. However, when I tried it with the Mac Mini, I was told by the OS that the security settings (which I did not actively set or change) did not allow the computer to be started from a boot drive. The same warning did tell how to change the security settings which was to restart is recovery mode (command and R keys pressed at restart) and find the security utility choice in the Utility menu to make the change. I have no idea if the unchanged setting would have prevented my trying to resurrect the computer from an external boot drive if the internal drive was truly unreadable but it did stop the computer from using an external boot drive during my test of the boot drive copy. After changing the setting, things worked as I expected them to and there was no issue with starting up from the external drive. Since your backup plan is similar to mine and included an external boot drive copy I thought I would mention my experience.

The second “issue” is interference with the Bluetooth keyboard and mouse connections. Most of the time the wireless connections are fine but every now and then there are periods where the connections are frequently dropped and reconnected. This was not a noticeable issue with the Mac Pro and any wireless mouse or keyboard I used with it. The Mac Mini is in the same room, and nearly in the same location as the MacPro was. A bit of research suggests the this is a known issue with the 2018 Mac Mini and it seems the likely culprit is interference from the WiFi router, probably when it is using 2.4 ghz. When things get a bit out of hand I can use the new Apple wireless keyboard as a wired keyboard when the charging cable is plugged into an active USB port and use an older wired mouse. I have put the external drives as far from the computer as possible and experimented a bit with different cables to try to reduce the chance they cause interference. Hopefully this gremlin will not visit you.

Overall the Mac Mini is much faster than my older, near 11 year old computer and does well with all the up-to-date photographic applications I use. I opted for the Mac Mini because I only have room for one monitor and I wanted to be able to use my trusty calibratable, matte screen unit as that single monitor.

[Keith]

Lots of good advice here for OS users....can anyone point me to PC equivalent regarding software to control all these drives. Concerning offsite backup, would it be feasible to pre-load a NAS drive with all current work, then set it up online at a family members house a few miles away for transferring new files as needed?

[Bruce McL]

"is there any risk of having all my local drives in one non-RAID enclosure?"

Not much, as long as it's a good enclosure with a fan. A RAID setup used for video every day would put much more stress on the enclosure than what you plan to do. I use an enclosure with two drives for some of my backup needs.

I also use an earlier model of this Drive Dock from macsales.com

https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/external-drives/owc-drive-dock

It's nice to be able to make a backup and then store the bare drive unconnected to any power source. It also makes it easy to periodically rotate the drives through my safe deposit box.

[Nige]

Just did a quick file count... over 250K (mostly jpgs so just under 2TB) in my photos folder(s) and I'm a film photographer! That what being the unofficial photographer for your kids sporting teams does for you.