Macbook Pro backup before repair

[mightyduck]

Originally Posted by JFreak

it is not about CCC but your drives' performance.

Thunderbolt 3.

So I am not really keen on partitioning the Lacie while the Time Machine backup is on it. If I understand correctly, ccc will just create a folder in the remaining space on the Lacie and it will clone to that folder. O

Or do I have to create a folder first, and then use that folder as the "destination"?



Best,

mightduck

[JFreak]

Originally Posted by mightyduck

Thunderbolt 3

That also tells me about transfer rate of your storage just as much as having two eyes tells me the speed of your reading

Go to App Store and download (free) Blackmagic Disk Speed Test and then tell me the MB/s of your source and destination drives. If you cannot do the math I can help you with it.

[mightyduck]

O.K. but I don't need to know to the minute. Just whether is a day or a couple hours or what, roughly for Thunderbolt 3.

[JFreak]

If it's 100MB/s read and write on both ends, backing up half a terabyte takes roughly hour and a half.
If both drives are 1000MB/s fast SSD's then about ten minutes.
If the performance is from 90's (10MB/s) then it will take +12hrs

You tell me how long it will take once you have that speed test installed. By default it tests your boot drive, but you can set it up to run the test on your external. TB3 has little to do with it. All we can say it will not be a bottleneck. It is the performance of your storage that counts.

[Darryl Ramm]

Lots does not seem good here. You only have one backup drive. You are suggesting trying out a new backup tool to the same drive... the danger of you destroying all your backups by making a finger mistake is real. (The most common cause of lost data is user error, not drive or other failure).

How big is the internal SSD? Go buy at least two external 7200 RPM drives that are at least a TB larger than the internal drive.. (that lets CCC keep deleted files in future). You can use a fast external SSD like a Samsung X5 if performance is critical (including performance as in you can boot off the clone and just get full work done), HDD are lower cost a better choice if you want to maintain longer term archives.

The questions about performance: It largely depends on the drive, but there is CCC overhead. I can backup a 2TB internal NVMe SSD to an external Samsung X5 Thunderbolt 3 NVMe SSD in about 40 minutes. A HDD might be several times slower. Add more time to carefully test clones work, are bootable etc. Why is any of this important? If you are in a rush to try creating a new backup on the same drive as time machine to rush to get to an Apple store appointment, that is a huge risk. Reschedule the appointment and get yourself organized.

If your premise is you have all sessions backed up and can live with receiving a erased computer back from Apple, then that is your choice. Hopefully you have time machine working correctly and understand how to recover sessions and/or user accounts using it and are OK living with the risk of having only one physical backup. ... I would not be doing anything like that.

You are asking about protecting other licenses.... again we cannot guess what you have. If your licenses are all on iLok keys then there is no license data to back up.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by mightyduck

O.K. but I don't need to know to the minute. Just whether is a day or a couple hours or what, roughly for Thunderbolt 3.

“Thunderbolt 3” tells us nothing that useful. Does that drive have a slow 4,800 rpm disk inside it or a NVNe SSD? Raw performance on these drives can differs by more than an order of magnitude.

And how large is the drive you are backing up 1TB? 2TB? 4TB?

You can start with an assumption of 1hr - 1.5 hr per TB (used capacity) for a decent HDD and just try and see.

[Darryl Ramm]

One of the whole points of cloning a drive is to get a bootable clone... that you can then test by booting off, testing is all important here. And this can make recovery as simple as just booting off that clone (but that may need a fast SSD external drive to give you the similar performance as the internal SSD).

This is impossible without creating partitions, and your Mac has multiple hidden partitions, you likely want all those cloned as well... to partitions on the clone drive. So do it right and get new external drives to clone to, at least two.

[mightyduck]

I downloaded a copy of carbon copy cloner.

I went and bought a "rugged" Lacie 2TB USBc drive. It says "up to 125 MB/s. I'm not going to go buy 9 extra SS drives and do bunch of testing and busy work. I have a good Time Machine backup, and I can [hopefully] do a ccc backup onto the virgin Lacie drive [which, tbh, I am not even sure is really necessary].

I stopped by the repair center, they were going to charge me for a backup, so I figured I'll buy a drive and do it myself for the same money. Maybe I can do this tonite and bring them the computer tomorrow. But I am not trying to make this a never-ending project.

Someone said something about duplicating the partitioning onto the backup drive. Is the Lacie drive problematic in any way? Does it need to be specially partitioned or something? Let me know if there are any steps to be taken.

My Mom is in the hospital, so I am doing this while handling a bunch of other stuff too. Don't fight over stupid stuff, and don't turn this thread into a sh*tstorm, please.

Or point me to a forum where I can get this squared away. Take it easy.


Best,

mightduck

[Darryl Ramm]

Start by ejecting/disconnect the external drive you have time machine backups on (that avoids any horrible mistakes). Connect the new Lacie drive.

Look at that drive in Disk Utility. It's probably formatted as HFS+ (Apple Extended...) On a modern systems just needing to restore to your MBP I would convert that to APFS... several reasons why that I'll spare you.

In Disk utility, *before* you use the drive.

Select the External Drive (BE VERY CAREFUL NOT TO SELECT THE INTERNAL DRIVE) > Click Erase > from the drop-down menu button select "APFS"

Click Apply

Then just run CCC. Create a new task in CCC with source your internal drive usually "Macintosh HD" and Destination the new external Lacie. Leave "Copy All Files" selected and "SafteyNet On" (for best safety with future incremental backups)

When CCC finishes, reboot your mac, holding down the option key while it is rebooting and choose to boot off that external drive. Check it boots and everything works. Shutdown the Mac, unplug the external drive, put it somewhere safe.

If you need to do this or not, that's up to you. I would so you have a separate boot backup outside of Timemachine. If you need to recover this will be much faster, and it's a good thing to be doing in general.

If you have a specific question on how to do something with CCC then ask, it's too much to go though how to use the whole thing, and CCC bombards you with more excessive popup help than you will likely want or need.

[mightyduck]

Thanks. I’ll try to get back to house in couple hours and try. Any other non-fighting comments welcome. I may have a couple questions but it seems pretty straightforward.