Mac Studio - Separate Drive?

[Eric Lambert]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

You can external boot an Apple Silicon Mac. I've done that multiple times on a M1 MBP (which I no longer have).

Thank you for all that, Darryl!

[Obsidian Dragon]

Thanks Darryl. I copied your post for future reference.

[dominicperry]

If it's not clear, and as per this page, if your internal drive is broken, you cannot externally boot an Apple Silicon Mac. This is why the 7.1 is still valuable if you want to quickly recover from a hardware failure. Of course, you can buy a couple or three Studios for the same price.

https://bombich.com/blog/2021/05/19/...lving-platform

Dominic

[Eric Lambert]

Peripherally relevant: I'm not seeing anything which suggests that TimeMachine backups to an external TB drive are a bad idea. This is what I do, and what others in my company do.

Of course this is to cover us if we lose data on the internal drive, and I understand that if the internal drive is damaged then these external TimeMachine backups won't help us, at least not on that particular machine, not until the internal drive is fixed and able to receive the data from the backup.

But, external TimeMachine backups are still acceptable for common Mac Studio backups, yes?

[dominicperry]

I did Time Machine backups for years and years and was very happy with them, including some restores to new machines and total restores when things failed with OS upgrades, but discovered that it's almost impossible to copy them from disk to disk.
When I upgrade my backup disks, I usually copy all my files from the old disk to the new disk. So, a full 250GB disk fits easily on a new 1TB disk. etc.
But it turns out that I cannot move the contents of my old TM backups to a new disk, which bothers me because old disks break because they are old. (I keep the old one but I also have the same data on a new one). I even purchased two applications that claimed to overcome the difficulties in copying TM backups. Neither worked.
So, I gave up with TM and now use CCC and SuperDuper, along with Dropbox and iDrive for cloud backups.
YMMV, of course.

Dominic

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by dominicperry

If it's not clear, and as per this page, if your internal drive is broken, you cannot externally boot an Apple Silicon Mac. This is why the 7.1 is still valuable if you want to quickly recover from a hardware failure. Of course, you can buy a couple or three Studios for the same price.

https://bombich.com/blog/2021/05/19/...lving-platform

Dominic

Any failure that renders the recovery volume not readable means yes you cannot boot off an external drive.

Which is Apple telling you how much they trust SSD reliability. And they are probably right. Recovery is a small volume, does not suffer from any wear, even if you trash the rest of the NAND it may still be readable.

And if things really went pair shaped... a failure of the SSD controller would mean a new CPU chip is needed. On most Macs I assume Apple would require a full motherboard replacement for controller and/or NAND failure. On the Studio models I would hope they provide for CPU and/or NAND card swaps.... but not heard any support war stories there yet.

[thin ice]

Originally Posted by dominicperry

I did Time Machine backups for years and years and was very happy with them, including some restores to new machines and total restores when things failed with OS upgrades, but discovered that it's almost impossible to copy them from disk to disk.
When I upgrade my backup disks, I usually copy all my files from the old disk to the new disk. So, a full 250GB disk fits easily on a new 1TB disk. etc.
But it turns out that I cannot move the contents of my old TM backups to a new disk, which bothers me because old disks break because they are old. (I keep the old one but I also have the same data on a new one). I even purchased two applications that claimed to overcome the difficulties in copying TM backups. Neither worked.
So, I gave up with TM and now use CCC and SuperDuper, along with Dropbox and iDrive for cloud backups.
YMMV, of course.

Dominic

I use Time Machine and Superduper for a bootable backup, but I see that is apparently pointless now. You can always use a second Time Machine backup disk if you are worried about reliability. You used to have to manually select between the disks, but this happens automatically now.

[dominicperry]

Originally Posted by thin ice

You can always use a second Time Machine backup disk if you are worried about reliability. You used to have to manually select between the disks, but this happens automatically now.

This doesn't help with TM backups from old machines that I no longer run. I want to be able to make a second copy of TM machine data from old machines, as well as the present one. That requires copying TM backups, which don't work - the copy runs for hours or days and always fails. And then it starts again at the beginning when you start a new copy.

Dominic