New user/backup questions

Hello,after probably twenty years I finally got fed up with the other operating system and purchased an IMac (one month ago)and I have to say I really love it and probably should have done this years ago.That being said,I have a few basic questions concerning backups mostly.First I created a bootable installer via the Terminal command lines for Yosemite,and then installed the upgrade to El Capitan-do I need to remake the bootable installer to work with El Capitan?Also I have a Seagate external disk for backup using the Time Machine app.Am I to understand that this is not bootable if there is a problem,correct?Also when I look in the Start Up disk utility I don't see the external hard drive or the USB installer when it is mounted-but they do show up on my screen when I restart and hold down Command.Is this how it should be or am I missing something?Hope I didn't pile on too many questions and thanks in advance!

Welcome to the Forums. Good to have you with us.

Extracting bits from the bundle of questions:

USB bootable installers are unique to the OS being installed. So the Yosemite installer is just that. You would need to make an El Capitan installer now that is your current OS. Not so easy given that the El Cap OS you downloaded was self-deleted after installation so no longer resides on your Mac. I think the only way of doing this now would be to re-download El Cap from the purchased tab of the App Store - if that is possible - not certain it is - and create a USB bootable installer from that. However, I note your comment that you made a previous USB installer for Yosemite via Terminal. As I never touch Terminal (and you obviously do), maybe there is a way of doing this for El Cap which is beyond my experience.

As regards Time Machine (TM): this is never bootable. It is not designed to be. TM is a wonderful way of backing up everything in the background, initially on an hourly basis and thereafter a daily & weekly intervals; but I'm sure you know this already as have been using TM. But it can never boot up your Mac.

For a back up that does re-boot, you need to use one of the cloning software systems such as Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper! These, as the name implies, make an exact copy or clone of your Mac's HD and are bootable. They are pay-for products and require a separate Ext HD for their purpose.

Your last questions re Start Up disk are answered above in that the Yosemite installer is no longer valid and TM is not bootable.

Folks with more experience of things in general, and Terminal in particular, may chime in with their bit. In the meantime, I hope the above has answered some of your points.

Ian

Connecting via USB will or should make the external drive appear on the desktop, and in Disk Utility. To set the drive up, go into Disk Utility, select it, use Erase nd opt for Mac OS Extended (Journaled), then into Partition, and under options select GUID format and proceed. The drive is then ready for backup. Personally I do not like TM, and suggest either SuperDuper or CarbonCopy as cloning software. Both make the external drive bootable in the case of emergency. I use SD and with the registered version one can do a simple weekly Dmart update process which reads the internal drive and copies or makes any changes necessary to the external. Takes less than five minutes on average. Doing this you will not need the USB flash drive with the operating system.

Make sure you always unmount the external drive before disconnecting. Right click and choose Eject, or simply drag desktop icon to the Trash.

Terminal is very powerful black magic and wise to keep out of unless you are an experienced Mac user.

Thanks to both of you for your helpful replies!

Back up wise I would go with an external hard drive permanently attached to your iMac and configured to make Time Machine back ups, supplemented with a further drive configured to make CCC or Super Duper bootable back ups perhaps weekly or more often if you've just done a large or important piece of work. I would then keep this drive somewhere safe away from your iMac.

Super Duper is available as a free app but the purchased version offers more options.

IWT said:

TM is a wonderful way of backing up everything in the background, initially on an hourly basis and thereafter a daily & weekly intervals;

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That's a new one on me, but I've only had TM running for less than 2 years. I was frustrated by the hourly backups, so I downloaded a third party utility that lets me tell it what time to execute. Can you please explain that interval thing a bit more? I don't need (or want) hourly backups, but I think a week is too much time between them.

@toMACash

Can you please explain that interval thing a bit more?

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With pleasure, and some embarrassment given your enormous experience.

TM keeps:

Hourly BUs for the past 24 hours
Daily BUs for the past month
Weekly BUs for all previous months

It does this without hindrance to your usage of your Mac. And if or when your EHD fills up, it automatically deletes the oldest BUs in order to make room for the latest.

Its real purpose is to provide a BU service without user interference or awareness; and serves the vital function of allowing the user to recover some file or photo etc which they accidentally deleted. Further, when you replace a dud disk or buy a new Mac, it restores the new disk or Mac to the position that pertained before, even allowing for a new OS.

But, big but; it is not bootable. So, great to have as your primary BU, but if you want a BU that allows you to boot up and get you working right away on your knackered Mac, or on another Mac, cloning software is needed - CCC or SD!

Basically, one needs both systems. TM needs no input from you when set up, cloning software needs some input and, in general usage, need only be updated, say, once a week or longer if your usage is modest.

Does this seem a reasonable summary?

Ian

I had no sooner finished my post above, than into my email came a summary of TM from Macworld. I could have written this myself!!

Link: http://www.macworld.co.uk/feature/m...tm_content=image&utm_campaign=mw-mainline0710

Ian

Your philosophy on backups (and what you are willing to spend on them) should depend on the "value" of your data and time. If you don't value your data or time, you don't need backups at all. If the drive crashes, just replace it, reinstall the OS and press on.

If your data and time is of "some" value but not a lot, then get a cheap external drive and use TM to do backups. It's self-regulating, does a good job. Keep the drive close to the Mac. If something catastrophic happens (fire, flood, meteor strike, etc.) you will lose not only the Mac but the backup, but it's only of "some" value, so you get a replacement and press on.

If your data and time are of "a lot" of value, then get two good external drives and use TM to one for backups, but use a cloner (CCC or SD!) to clone the boot drive to the other. The TM backup is a historical file, so you can go back to any point in time and recover what you had then (in case you accidentally deleted it, for example) and the clone will provide an instant repair for a failed internal drive--you can boot from it and be back under way while you wait for the replacement to come in, and when it does, you can clone the clone to the new drive and be on your way.

If your data and time are "invaluable" or "priceless" to you, then get three drives (or four, depending on your level of paranoia) and use two of them just as described above in the "a lot" category, then the third should be a clone of the TM drive that you take somewhere else to store (bank deposit box, fire and waterproof safe, etc) for off-site storage. Now if you have the unthinkable disaster, you retrieve the off-site drive, clone it to the new machine and you're off and running, only losing what happened after you took the drive off-site. If you are paranoid enough, take the fourth drive as a clone of the boot drive and store it with the clone of the TM drive. That way you can boot from it as soon as you have a new machine and be running on that clone even before you clone it back to the new internal drive.

If your data and time are "absolutely irreplaceable" to you, then put a completely identical system at a completely removed site and get a very high speed connection between that location and your "standard" location and clone both the TM backups and the clone backups from the Standard location to the remote site. The remote site should also have its own TM and clone backups so that if the standard location is totally destroyed by alien attack, for example, you just have to get yourself to the remote site and you are back in business immediately.

Yes, these options increase in cost and technical complexity as you move up the paranoia chain. I personally stopped at "a lot." If I were running a business that I depended on for my livelihood, I would at least be at the "invaluable" level, or maybe even "irreplaceable" if I had enough working capital.

How much to spend? Never spend more than the value of the data and time to recover from it to you. Otherwise it's wasted money. I spent 35 years consulting in the IT industry and I've given the same advice to Fortune 50 companies all across the US. You get it for free!

You're welcome!

MacInWin said:

Your philosophy on backups (and what you are willing to spend on them) should depend on the "value" of your data and time.

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Nice progression of importance vs. solutions!

MacInWin said:

How much to spend? Never spend more than the value of the data and time to recover from it to you. Otherwise it's wasted money.

Click to expand...

Of course some folks purchase Mac Pro's…and really only need a Palm Pilot!

MacInWin said:

I spent 35 years consulting in the IT industry and I've given the same advice to Fortune 50 companies all across the US. You get it for free!

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I'm sure with this sort of experience those companies got charged big bucks (fair rate). And we get it for free!!! Thanks

-Nick

It should be mentioned that you can handle the "offsite" backup part in a couple of different ways. Some people want a nearly-complete offsite backup of all their data, and that's fine. As mentioned, you can put that on a drive and send that drive off to someone nearby (such as one employee who takes the business's backup home with him or her each day/week/whatever), but regional disasters might nullify the value of that "offsite but not very far away" backup. Others might choose to backup only the really precious stuff (photos for example) and burn it on to a CD/DVD and pop that into a safe deposit box (not bad, CDs and DVDs may be outmoded now but they will likely be readable for the next 20 years or more).

So large set of backup data or small set of backup data that needs to go offsite, there's another option: cloud storage. We are of course talking about encrypted and secure, non-public cloud storage (which every major and minor service offers these days). With a big set of data, uploading can be super-cumbersome and slow, but lots of people do it: BackBlaze for example is one such service, there are many others. With a small set of "precious" data to send offsite, services like that (or even iCloud Drive, or Box, or something like that) is easier to manage.

A company I use and like called IDrive has a clever way of working with both: they'll send you up to a 3TB drive for you to put your data on, you send it back to them, and they put in cloud-storage. Saves a TON of uploading time and works well for "big set of data" or small. Incremental updates can be handled over the web and if you need it they'll ship you the drive again once a year without charge to make a fresh "main" backup. I have no affiliation with IDrive other than being a satisfied customer, and I'm not knocking any of the myriad alternatives.

One caution on all of the "deep storage" backup ideas: As the technology changes, you need to update that deep storage to be useable. Consider that in the 1980's tape on reels was a common backup media for bigger sites, Eight-inch floppies for smaller. Today the readers for those media are in museums, not installations, so as the technology changes, the backup media needs to change with it. CD/DVD's are fine, but don't bury one in a vault and expect to pull it out to read in 20 years...the technology will have moved. Even now, Apple doesn't include optical media on their systems any more, and others will soon follow suit.

IWT said:

Does this seem a reasonable summary?

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Weeeellll... Yes, but. The post I replied to implies that TM backs up hourly at the beginning, then weekly, then monthly. Actually, that's what your post says, literally. Your summary says that TM keeps backups hourly, weekly and monthly. That's not the same thing. Presumably, it is still actually executing the backups hourly, but at some point (reading between the lines) it decides to delete all but one for the week, then all but last month's weekly backups, and the monthly one from 13 months ago.

The execution of backups slows things down considerably. That's why, very shortly after purchasing an external drive and setting TM up, I found a TM scheduler to make it back up when I'm not likely to be using the computer.

I haven't followed the link you provided. Not enough time to type this and read that... So there are still gaps in my understanding of when it actually deletes old backups. It's been my understanding that it will fill the available space before deleting the oldest session, but your summary does not seem to support that.

I have to say that when Time Machine is doing its thing on an hourly basis, it takes so little time that I don't ever notice it happening. Now there can be some exceptions to this -- a Parallels file that represents a PC OS changes constantly while in use, forcing Time Machine back up the entire file (which is usually many gigs in size) every hour for example (you have to exclude those sorts of things from TM backups). Otherwise, most people don't really change much of anything in a given hour's time other than their browser cache. A long Time Machine backing up interval is a good sign something is wrong, and that a visit to the logs may be in order.

This is not to say that you might prefer to use a scheduler to have Time Machine back up after you've gone to bed or some such, but of course THAT backup will definitely take longer since it is having to back up an entire day's worth in one go, rather than an hour's worth. It's all about how much work you're comfortable losing if a drive experiences sudden death.

chas, I use a schedule for TM to put it to a nighttime backup. I don't care how long it takes at 1 am, I'm not using the machine then, so I don't see the impact on performance. But then, I can afford to lose a days "work" and not be in too bad a place. I'm not using it for work anymore. If I was depending on it for work related stuff, it would be backing up more frequently, perhaps even the default once/hour! it's all in who much YOU can afford to lose, and everybody has to make that decision for themselves. I view TM as a "oops, I accidentally deleted or changed something" backup, with my CCC clone backup (also done once a day at night) as the "wow, the HD just died" backup. Yes, the TM backup CAN be that "wow" backup, but it isn't bootable, so I would be out of the water until the new HD was installed and i could restore from the TM drive.

MacInWin said:

I view TM as a "oops, I accidentally deleted or changed something" backup, with my CCC clone backup (also done once a day at night) as the "wow, the HD just died" backup. Yes, the TM backup CAN be that "wow" backup, but it isn't bootable, so I would be out of the water until the new HD was installed and i could restore from the TM drive.

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Yes, exactly. Well put.

I got into the habit of copying any file I changed to a flash drive after each and every session before TM existed. I still do that. But then, I only change files or add new files a couple of times a week, usually. So I'm not worried about losing something I've done. I also copy all my files to IDrive every couple of weeks, and I do a new clone once a month. Seeing how the computer is not used for work or that often for personal stuff, I think I'm pretty well covered. Thus, I don't care to have TM backing up hourly. I have an old Mac, and it does slow things down to the point that doing anything else is excruciatingly frustrating. I do believe that my hard drive is ailing, and I think I'll be looking into getting a new Mac soon. Maybe, based on some of the info in this thread, I'll change my TM strategy then. We'll see.