Quote:
Originally Posted by jdh95
I have used CCC 5.09 to make a sparseimage of APFS SSD to a HFS+ drive, but have yet to do a restore. Will this HFS+ CCC sparseimage of the APFS drive then correctly restore properly?
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Nobody can ever guarantee your backups will work. You *have* to test they do. And here you are exposed to the issue mentioned above. The issue triggers when the sparse image uses APFS internally, regardless of the filesystem the image live on. But to trigger the problem you have to write enough to the sparse image that at some point (maybe in the past) you exceed the real physical free space on the underlying storage. Read that Bombich software article carefully, it tells you what to check. You can only be doing what you say you are doing if you created those volumes using an older version of CCC.
Backing up to sparse disk images to NAS can be convenient, nice say for automatic overnight backups. But you really want to think this all through. How do you recover a computer from those images if it had totally lost its boot drive, or you totally lost the entire computer? For that its often much more convenient to have a physical clone of at least the boot/system disk to get started. In many cases you could just plug that Thunderbolt or USB 3 drive into the Mac, reboot and just keep working. Recovery happens at the speed of a reboot.
If you are using any type of NAS backups to backup your boot/system drive, think through all the steps involved with doing a full recovery. Think about scenarios where the boot disk loses its content, the boot disk is totally dead, or the entire computer is gone/destroyed/stolen and then think through similar for the NAS server itself....hopefully you have extra onsite and offsite backups/archives. You can do lots of different things for recovering the boot drive, setup netboot images, boot off a special recovery drive, clone the sparse disk image back to a boot partition. It may need to use a spare unused partition, might use a spare blank external drive and clone to that from the NAS image using a third computer, etc. There are lots of ways to skin the cat, but you need a plan for one or more that you know works.
NAS can be a great way to back up user files and projects. But even then sparse image backup on a NAS might be overkill, I often prefer say just backing up working folders to folders on the NAS, manually dragging or dropping content or with low level scripts on the Mac. Some folks like time machine to a NAS, but it's not great for systems recovery, and gives you limited control of stuff, but hopefully Apple will improve it more, now they have APFS underneath time machine.