It’s important to have a backup plan and stick to it. Ideally you will have at least two backup systems in use, so if your backup drive dies, you have a second backup. My preferred backup system is to use SuperDuper to make bootable clones of my hard drive partitions and Time Machine to do incremental backups during the day.
But what do you backup to?
Some people back up to the Cloud, others to a networked drive or server, and others to a hard drive connected to their computer. Each has its pros and cons.
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Hard Drives Make the Most Sense
If you’re made of money, backing up to SSD would be a nice, fast way to backup your data, but the cost of an SSD tends to make this prohibitive for most users. It’s not practical.
Backing up to some sort of flash media, such as a thumb drive, will generally be very slow compared to an SSD – and even to a hard drive. Great for backing up your Documents folder or a project; not so great for backing up your drive.
Even if you computer has a fast SSD or one of Apple’s Fusion Drives, the most cost effective backup is a hard drive. I prefer to use a 7200 rpm drive with a big buffer, but even a 5400 rpm drive with a smaller buffer will do the job. You can get an external enclosure for $7 plus shipping, and Amazon.com has some nice 4 TB HGST UltraStar drives for just $57.
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Connecting the Drive
A word of advice: If you use Time Machine for backup, plan on spending a few minutes away from your Mac during backup. It’s a very intensive process, and while your Mac can multitask, it tends to be an exercise in frustration.
That said, if your computer has an SSD, it will catalog the drive much faster than it would a hard drive, so there is less delay in comparing what’s on your drive vs. the backup drive, and reading from SSD also ties up less processor cycles. If you have to work while backup is running, SSD can be a big plus.
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Your Only Mac
If you only have one computer, get a drive enclosure that uses the fastest data connection your computer has – Thunderbolt, USB 3.1, USB 3.0, FireWire 800, FireWire 400, or USB 2.0. (Yes, USB 1.1 works, but it will be excruciatingly slow.)
Better yet, if you happen to have a Mac with room for another internal drive, that’s another very fast option. A Mac mini (the original 2″ tall version) has room for a 2.5″ drive in its optical drive bay, as do most iMacs. If you have an older MacBook or MacBook Pro with an optical drive, you also have the option of buying a bracket that lets you install a hard drive (or SSD) in that drive bay.
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You Have an AirPort Hub or Time Capsule
It’s not a super-fast option, but if you have an AirPort Extreme hub, you can attach a USB 2.0 hard drive and use it with Time Machine. The advantage is that you don’t need to put a second hard drive in your Mac, and your backup is safely at home or in the office when you are out in the field with your ‘Book.
The disadvantage is that it is a USB 2.0 hard drive. If you plan on backing up, look for a Time Capsule, which is an AirPort Hub with a built-in hard drive. That drive is not limited to USB 2.0 speed.
Note that PowerPC Macs cannot take advantage of a hard drive partition larger than 2.19 TB if formatted with the Apple Partition Map. PowerPC Macs can however see a virtually unlimited sized drive if formatted with GUID and running Panther or later.
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Backing Up with Two or More Macs
If you’re using only Intel-based Macs, you can use an hard drive capacity that your Mac supports. In this day and age, I don’t think there is a hard drive out there that comes close to the maximum that macOS supports. But if you are also backing up one or more PowerPC Macs, note that they can only use partitions up to 2 GB in size.
I have quite the collection of production Macs: a 2.0 GHz 2007 Mac mini with 3 GB RAM, SSD, and Mac OS X 10.6.8 Snow Leopard; a 2.0 GHz Late 2008 Aluminum MacBook with 8 GB RAM, SSD plus a hard drive in the optical drive bay, and usually running OS X 10.11 El Capitan; a 2.4 GHz Early 2008 20″ iMac with 6 GB RAM, its original 250 GB hard drive, and also running El Capitan; and a 3.06 GHz 21.5″ Mid 2010 iMac with 12 GB RAM, its original 500 GB hard drive, and separate partitions with Snow Leopard, El Capitan, and macOS 10.13 High Sierra. (Unfortunately that machine is in need of some TLC. It overheats and likes to go into a continuous restart loop if I am running anything other than Snow Leopard. A new power supply, new thermal paste, and clearing out 8 years worth of dust should help.)
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Backing Up to a Mac
In my case, I back up the 21.5″ iMac to its own external hard drive and the 20″ iMac to a shared external hard drive. My reasoning is that because these are the Macs that I use the most, they will back up more quickly to an attached hard drive. (I use FireWire 800, which is built in on both of these and over twice as fast as USB 2.0. FireWire 400 is a bit faster than USB 2.0.)
I have file sharing set up on both iMacs so I can easily copy files to the Mac mini, which has an older version of Photoshop Elements and is my machine for image editing. I can also mount the external hard drive on the iMac thanks for file sharing.
The Mac mini and MacBook use the same hard drive as the 20″ Mac mini, and because both of them run from SSD, they tend to backup fairly quickly unless there are two or more backups going on at the same time. (I use Time Machine Scheduler with Snow Leopard and Time Machine Editor with OS X 10.9 and later. Both let me change the backup schedule so it doesn’t take place every single hour. Some of my Macs are set to every 3 hours, some as long as 6 hours between backup.)
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The Best Mac to Use as a Backup Server
Hands down the best Mac to use as a backup server is a “cheese grater” Mac Pro, since every model has at least four cores, uses SATA II (3.0 Gbps), and has six built-in drive bays – four for 3.5″ hard drives and two for optical drives, which can also hold 3.5″ hard drives. (But you only have four SATA ports, so you may as well ignore the optical drive bays.)
True, SATA II isn’t the latest and greatest and fastest, but for networked backup, it’s faster than gigabit ethernet. The only drawback is that the Mac Pro uses more power than other Macs, but if you’ve got it up and running as a production machine or file server anyhow, you may as well put it to use for backup.
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Backup Strategy
My backup system is to use a dedicated partition on the backup drive for each partition on my Macs so I can have a fully bootable, although usually somewhat outdated, backup that I can boot from should my Mac’s hard drive fail. I use SuperDuper for this, and it works fine with a remote shared volume for backups.
After creating enough partitions for all of my bootable partitions, I create one huge partition for Time Machine. At worst my backup will only be a few hours out of date, and doing a full restoration from a bootable partition (shut down the backup server, connect the external backup drive to whichever Mac needs restoration, and let SuperDuper do its thing) and then using Time Machine to update it.
I do set Time Machine to not bother with my Dropbox folder, since that is stored in the cloud and easily recovered.
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