But if they need to install a new drive, how do I know that the almost 2TB of data I’m pulling from the Time Machine invisible files and CCC backups are complete and valid? At least, the folders that I can see that appear backed up? I’m hoping that when my main computer is fixed, they find a hardware failure causing boot failure, not disk corruption. I further backed up to a third drive which just dragged over my user folder, but that’s only done twice a year and those files are now 5 months old. It seems to have created backups that have certain folders, not all.
Unfortunately, it too seems to have not been making complete archive backups. I also was backing up to Carbon Copy Cloner. I find this hard to believe as I periodically run disk utility on the drives. Unclear what this means, if I copy over my music library or a folder with 900 documents, I may not be actually getting the entire complete archive of what I had? Apple is saying I probably had disk corruption happening for a long time. They said I could pull the data from the Time Machine hidden files, but “snapshots” in the Drive Utility first aid means that the Mac was not able to actually make complete backups. On the phone with Apple advanced support, they’ve never seen this happen and have no explanation. However, I cannot use Disk Recovery to initiate using them. Entering terminal commands to show hidden files, I can then see all of the Time Machine backups. “Get info” shows the disk is occupied with space equal to my broken Mac’s data. First Aid says that the Time Machine disk (with the hidden files) is OK. Running first aid, I can see Disk Utility going through Time Machine snapshots up until an hour or so before my computer failed. The system cannot locate any files for Time Machine. I had a spare Mac at home to use for work in the meantime, so I imaged it and plugged in my Time Machine drive to start recovery. Genius Bar recommended bringing the system in for hardware repair. Trying to restart with all methods including a Big Sur external boot drive failed. I came back a few hours later to a question mark folder. Not the outdated full-screen TM UI that we have now.Recently I put my computer to sleep. I'd much rather pick a file, see a list of previous versions of that file with previews, and maybe a diff, all integrated properly into the Finder. So wasting 2x space for one identical file.Īlso TM is sluggish on networked disks and the UI is pretty awful. Change the title of that file and the entire thing gets copied across again, without the other file being deleted on the backup. For a 1kb file that doesn't matter, but nowadays with file sizes ballooning, 1GB+ files are pretty common. A snapshot stores only the block-level difference between files, whereas Time Machine copies the entire file across again even if there's one single bit changed. Whether APFS supports this right now, I'm not is completely right with his comment. However, snapshots don't technically have to be stored on the source drive.
How would an APFS snapshot on the same physical disk save your data from the failure of said disk? Why aren't they retiring this antique approach to back-ups? I mean, they now have a filesystem that supports snapshots