CCATP_2025_01

Adam Angst covers backup strategies for Mac users, highlighting bootable vs. regular backups, automated solutions, and the impact of security changes on recovery practices amid a macOS bug.

Transcript

Music:
[0:00] Music

Welcome Back, Adam Angst

Allison:
[0:07] It's that time of the week again. It's time for Chit Chat Across the Pond. This is episode number 807 for January 14th, 2025, and I'm your host, Allison Sheridan. Well, I'd like to welcome back to the show the venerable Adam Angst of Tidbits. Welcome back. It seems like we've been forever that we've talked. Maybe it's just because it's on the other side of Christmas and CES, but it seems like a long time.

Adam Engst:
[0:29] There's been a lot that's happened in the meantime. Plus, the world's burning. So, oh, well, only Los Angeles, but still.

Allison:
[0:35] Other than that, by the way, I looked up venerable because Adam is a word nerd, and I didn't want to mischaracterize him. And the definition of venerable that I see is accorded a great deal of respect, especially because of age wisdom or that it's goes on after that.

Adam Engst:
[0:52] There are a few times when you use a word like that, and you're like, I hope that was what I meant I thought it means.

Allison:
[0:59] Exactly. Well, a lot of events have been going on lately that bring to the foreground the awareness of how important it is to have a good backup strategy. And you've written an article about some things that have happened in the Mac community about backups, and you've also done a survey of your users. And then also Los Angeles is burning.

The Importance of Backup Strategies

Allison:
[1:16] So between those three things, I think we have a nice little structure to go through here. But why don't you start with what triggered thinking about backups now for you yeah

Adam Engst:
[1:25] So so apple just before the holidays apple released mac os sequoia 15.2 and this was a big release with all the more apple intelligence features blah blah blah but from this perspective the main problem that it it created was that it introduced a bug in a low-level Apple tool called Apple System Restore, or ASR. ASR is what's relied upon by apps like SuperDuper and Carbon Copy Cloner and Chronosync to make bootable backups. And with this bug, they could no longer do so.

Allison:
[2:02] And so just like overnight? All of a sudden,

Adam Engst:
[2:05] Yeah, like boom, bootable backups don't work. And this was like completely out of the hands of the developers because they literally have to hand off to ASR for the making of the bootable backup. And this, like everything else, this really gets back to Apple's emphasis on security. Because we are now in a world where every Mac is running from assigned system volume. So, macOS, it's this incredible – Howard Oakley has this – he's figured out how it all works. And it's like, you know, it loads all the information from your read-only internal drive, builds a disk image in memory, puts it all there, compares the cryptographic hashes, blah, blah, blah. I mean, it's insane just how Apple has grown.

Allison:
[2:59] Howard is a national treasure, though, to look it up, understand it, and tell us about it. whether you can understand it or not.

Adam Engst:
[3:06] Yeah. But the practical upshot of this is that when you start copying the system around, you open up all sorts of possibilities for security vulnerabilities. And so that's why Apple says basically, no, you can't do it to developers. You have to use ASR. And so they've done that. And this has been true for a couple of years now.

Allison:
[3:31] I'm going to break in real quick just to make sure everybody's caught with us. A bootable backup means you have a perfect clone that if your internal drive were to fail, you could boot off of that, depending on what Apple security says about what you can do there, but you would be back up and running as though nothing had changed. A normal backup would just be your files, maybe your applications, depending on how you choose to do it, but not, and even your system settings and things, but not booting from that drive. You would still need to install macOS and then add everything back in.

Apple's Bootable Backup Bug

Adam Engst:
[4:03] Absolutely. And yeah, there's a lot of ifs, ands, and buts surrounding the bootable duplicate as well, bootable backup. But to get back to this, so this bug basically breaks the bootability of backups. So all of these apps, Carbon Copy Cloner, SuperDuper, ConoSync, can still make complete backups of all your data, which you could then use Migration Assistant if, say, your drive fails. We have to talk more about what drive fails means. But you could reinstall macOS and then as part of Migration Assistant, when you're setting it up, bring all your data back from the backup. Or Time Machine also makes a very similar kind of backup for use with Migration Assistant. And so from Apple's perspective, that's really sort of the primary way you want to come back up after something has gone bad or when you're moving from one machine to another.

Allison:
[5:04] So, we shouldn't be wearing our pretty little heads about trying to do all this fancy pants stuff to save us more time. They've given us the one true way to do it.

Adam Engst:
[5:15] That's the belief. I mean, Apple, of course, doesn't ever really come out and say this super explicitly. And the three developers, Mike Bombich of Carbon Copy Cloner, Dave Nanian of SuperDuper, and Dee Prony of Chronosync. I've talked to all of them or read stuff they've written online. And they all have slightly different views about the future of beautiful backups. Mike Bombich posted a big blog post where he related some of his several-year-ago discussions with Apple when this whole thing started. I don't know if you remember, but when Apple moved to the signed system volume, and there was one step before that as well that was sort of interim security, that's when all this broke, and Apple had to come up with this new method. And so for a while, bootable backups were broken then too.

Allison:
[6:10] Well, that's why I was surprised when this story broke, and Dave Danian is the one who really brought it to the foreground. When I saw it, I was like, but I thought they were already gone, because I used Carbon Copy Cloner, and Mike Bombich has kind of washed his hands of the idea.

Adam Engst:
[6:24] It yeah and he still has it i mean it's in there as a legacy i think they call it legacy bootable backups or something like that um part of the part of the difference comes with the difference between intel and apple apple silicon that's one of the aspects as well as the security side of it but so yes mike bombich he's he's pretty down on it um his opinion is that he's keeping bootable backups around in carbon copy cloner as a service for those still running intel-based max, and you know and yes it might work for Apple Silicon Max but he's he feels that Apple has said that the writing is on the wall for this to be deprecated in the future so Dave Nanian don't.

Allison:
[7:06] Look don't stand on that banana peel

Adam Engst:
[7:09] Right Dave Nanian has a different view he feels that bootable backups are still fully supported by Apple System Restore and there's no downside in making them They're just as good as a data-only backup if you're going to use Migration Assistant and use Apple's technique of reinstalling Mac OS and restoring from Migration Assistant. So why not make it a bootable backup and possibly get the benefit of being able to boot your Mac from it as well?

Allison:
[7:36] Emphasis on possibly. Because don't they restrict you from booting from external drives and things? Isn't that a security risk?

Adam Engst:
[7:44] So we'll get to that. Third one, though, the ChronoSync guys, they've actually, it turns out, been down on bootable backups for quite a while. Actually, even, I would say, dating from before the whole, you know, Apple System Restore kind of changing how bootable backups worked. And from their perspective, a lot of the problems that people were recovering from were actually caused by cruft in the system. Like you installed some bad kernel extensions or things like that. So if you made a bootable backup and then backed up from it, the bad stuff just came back. And so they had already been pushing data-only backups to make sure you kept getting kind of a clean system and then your data back on top of that. So a little bit of difference in how they all see it.

The Future of Backup Methods

Adam Engst:
[8:34] But the fact of the matter is that for now, in Mac OS 15.2, you cannot make a bootable backup. It is very likely that will get fixed in a future version of Mac OS, but until that ships, we don't know what the story is going to be.

Allison:
[8:51] Okay, and that doesn't matter which one of these backup programs you're running, you're not going to be able to do it right now.

Adam Engst:
[8:58] Not right now.

Allison:
[8:59] So do we know if Apple dumped this on purpose or whether it was a mistake? Do we know anything about that?

Adam Engst:
[9:06] I think it's pretty obvious that it's a mistake. um i mean you know apple apple will tell developers if it's going to step on their heads, um and and you know there will be some kind of back channel and that's not the back channel i'm hearing um i'm hearing you know other you know that you know stuff happens you know no one anticipates that you know that that there are going to be bugs but bugs happen and so we'll see um as i said nothing nothing's confirmed no one's talking on the record etc etc but um i believe that this will get fixed um and bootable backups will come back um but that still leads over the question of like do we really care yeah.

Allison:
[9:53] That's kind of where what my next question we're gonna was gonna be if there if it is difficult to boot from an external drive than does, or maybe impossible. Maybe we can talk about that first because if you can't boot from an external drive, then that can save me until I can get my machine into AppleCare.

Adam Engst:
[10:13] So the first thing to think about is again, whether you're talking Intel or Apple Silicon. If you're talking Intel, things are just easier. That yeah, you can basically just, you know, hold down the option key at boot and choose the drive that's connected and boot from it. Easy peasy. With Apple Silicon, there's a big, big, big difference. And that is that the internal drive has to be functional.

Allison:
[10:43] For you to be able to boot externally?

Adam Engst:
[10:45] Yes. And the reason is for security reasons, right? So you have to basically say, this account that I have in my internal drive approves this external drive to boot.

Allison:
[11:00] And if I had a functioning internal drive, I wouldn't need a bootable backup.

Adam Engst:
[11:05] You got it. And plus, keep in mind, the structure of a modern M-series Mac, the disk structure, is actually pretty complicated. There's multiple, I don't even know what to call them necessarily, APFS volumes or partitions or things like that. Right. I'm a little hazy on the exact specifics, but the idea is that there's multiple fail-safes of macOS recovery, where you can go, okay, something's happened to a portion of your internal storage, but the rest of it is still fine, so we can boot into macOS recovery and reinstall macOS. So that's possible. And there's actually two levels of that macOS recovery if you need to download one entirely from the internet, things like that. So it's wildly complicated behind the scenes. But the practical upshot is that if the internal storage goes, your Mac's dead. Just dead. It ain't booing for nothing.

Allison:
[12:12] There's no point in this bootable backup.

Adam Engst:
[12:13] No, not going to work. And you're sending it back to Apple. Simple as that. Right. And so the, you know, now you could argue, and there's definitely an argument here, that your bootable backup could boot another Mac.

Allison:
[12:31] Okay.

Adam Engst:
[12:32] So, you could, you know, you say you have an M1 MacBook Air and you have an M4 Mac Mini, your M4 Mac Mini somehow dies, and you could take your bootable backup from that and boot your M1 MacBook Air and be up and running very quickly, in theory.

Allison:
[12:48] Well, that's an interesting idea because this other, the other Mac is fine.

Adam Engst:
[12:53] In theory. You know, like, I don't have the hardware to test this in any significant way, for one. And for two, in fact, in my situation, I have a 27-inch Intel Mac. So you definitely cannot boot a bootable backup from an Intel Mac onto an Apple Silicon Mac.

Understanding Bootable Backups

Adam Engst:
[13:14] They aren't going to match. Yeah. Vice versa. So if you're switching Intel to Apple Silicon, worthless. You could only do a stay within your platform. Right. All that said, I've always, or I've for a very long time been dubious about, booting one Mac from another when you're changing the Mac type.

Allison:
[13:39] Okay.

Adam Engst:
[13:40] Just because it's not the same thing. You know, like, you know, I mean, again, who knows Apple Silicon, but even, you know, back in the old days, you know, if you were working with, you know, a Power Mac 6100 and you had a, you know, a Power Mac 7500, well, there were differences between them and Apple had little system extensions that were important for things like that to happen. So it's not, booting Macs from a random drive is not something I feel is a reliable solution. It might work, but I don't want to rely on it might work in a disaster situation.

Allison:
[14:18] Right, right. So this gets back to what kind of backups you do want to do.

Adam Engst:
[14:24] Well, and think about it also a little bit more on the bootable side. Why do you want a bootable backup?

Allison:
[14:30] Well, I wanted it because if my internal drive failed, I could boot from it. But apparently I can't.

Adam Engst:
[14:35] Right. But let's assume that you can recover your data, you know, and, you know, let's assume your internal drive is actually fine. Just somehow everything's gotten just totally hosed on the volume that has, you know, your data such that you need to, you know, like the only way to recover is to erase and restore.

Allison:
[14:54] Right, okay.

Adam Engst:
[14:56] So the bootable backup, what that gets you is very quick recovery, or not recovery, very quick return to being able to function. So imagine that you're a busy video professional or something like that, and you're working on deadline, and something goes horribly wrong. Wrong, you can come back up and be working again within a certain number of minutes. I mean, it's one of those things where it's always going to take someone a little bit of time to figure out what's gone wrong and how they're going to deal and whatnot. So let's say within an hour, you can be working again on exactly what you were working on before. So the question then is, if you don't have a bootable backup, how much longer is it going to take you to reinstall mac os and migrate data back via migration assistant it will be longer no question probably a couple hours because.

Allison:
[15:57] The data's got to move but nothing else

Adam Engst:
[15:59] Right data's got to move um so and and so and you're going to have to do that at some point anyway keep in mind i mean if you work for a bootable backup that's stopgap but.

Allison:
[16:09] It can be

Adam Engst:
[16:09] That's getting you up and running it.

Allison:
[16:11] Can be on your schedule so you you have this delivery due friday you can finish and then saturday is the day that you choose to move your data not right you better do it right

Alternatives to Bootable Backups

Adam Engst:
[16:19] That's the value of the bootable backup. Now, I would argue that there's enough ifs, ands, and buts surrounding this bootable duplicate, that it is, if you are such an important, busy professional, a better approach would be to have a second Mac. And the simple reason for that is that what happens if your storage actually does fail or you drop your MacBook on the ground and break it? Right. Like, you're not booting anything. It's just dead.

Allison:
[17:01] So that's an expensive backup drive, though. Okay, I need another couple thousand dollars to back this up.

Adam Engst:
[17:07] It is and it isn't, though, because you probably have multiple Macs around if you are a professional in the sense of you have probably upgraded from a previous one. Um you know you might have an old one around you might have a colleague that kind of thing that basically in my mind it makes more sense to figure out a quick return to work approach that does not rely on bootable backups yeah.

Allison:
[17:34] I would agree with

Adam Engst:
[17:35] That because they're a little on the flaky side from you know like this asr thing shows right you know right.

Allison:
[17:40] Right well and if not delivering that video project on Friday means you lose $2,000, then that was the right decision was to have a second Mac that you could jump onto.

Adam Engst:
[17:51] And so that depends entirely on just how important your ability to maintain productivity is. A whole lot of us, yeah, it would be nice, but really it's not the end of the world, right?

Allison:
[18:05] I think most people I talk to that are not you and me tell me, they go, Alison, I don't really install that much stuff. You know, I had a friend of mine who's like, definitely depends on video for making his living. And he's just like, I just, I don't do what you do. I mean, I, I install things constantly, you know, installed software before I started talking to today. It's just constant. And so reconfiguring a system is a huge deal to me to get it back to where I was with all the weird stuff. And I'm the one with the cruft that the Chronosync people are talking about.

Adam Engst:
[18:39] And that's, I mean, so, yeah, so there's a little bit of that, you know, like, and then the other thing that I think has changed in the last, you know, five, 10 years is cloud storage. It used to be, and it's still true, that Dropbox is not a backup. ICloud Drive is not a backup. It just isn't. Don't think of it as a backup. However, you can think of it as a way of returning to work more quickly.

Allison:
[19:08] Right.

Adam Engst:
[19:09] So in my situation for instance have this 27 inch imac um and my m1 macbook air and i use icloud drive to sync desktop and documents folders so most of the file-based work i do i keep on my desktop while i'm working on it you know screenshots for articles things like that um and is and icloud drive at this point works pretty well for that so you know within in 30 seconds or less, pretty much every time the files are on the other machine. And, you know, Dropbox, Google Drive, they all work similarly. And so if you are working in one of these situations or you're like, the other thing I do is I'm doing all my writing and online word processors now, Google Drive, Lex, things like that. So I can go to my other machine and pick up within seconds.

The Role of Cloud Services

Adam Engst:
[20:01] Admittedly, that's also partly because I use Arc, which syncs what I'm doing on the web as well. But basically my machines are always in sync with data and function. So that I can actually flip back and forth between them. So I'm actually completely, I would be unhappy if a machine died, don't get me wrong, but it would not actually impact my productivity at all.

Allison:
[20:24] Now, I don't use online word processors, but I choose my text editor applications based on do they sync through iCloud? Because if they do, then I can also type on my iPad. So at any point in time, I'm writing on two different Macs and on my iPad, And if I need to get to a file, I can often get to it on my phone if I have to. And Apple Files with iCloud and the other services really brings that. Today, I saved, I printed to PDF from Apple Mail on my iPad to my Synology using the Files app. Because it turns out you can mount an SMB share. So having that connectivity that way, you don't necessarily have to do online word processors to do that. But that makes it even easier.

Adam Engst:
[21:10] I mean, in some ways, it's exactly the same thing at just a slightly different level of the data. You know, the data is constantly moving back and forth via an online cloud service as opposed to being stored in a single place in the cloud for Google Drive or Lex or whatever.

Allison:
[21:27] I want to make sure you don't stay focused. You keep saying Lex. What is Lex?

Adam Engst:
[21:32] So i've started using this new ai based uh word word word processor online word processor called lex lex.page and what's fascinating about it is is that it's it's basically like google docs um not quite as good as google docs unsurprisingly because google docs is extremely mature um but you get a sidebar where you can just talk to an ai and and then do a whole lot of stuff where you're talking to it about what you're writing.

Allison:
[22:01] So I know Adam Engst well enough to know that he's not letting it write for him, but it's a research tool?

Adam Engst:
[22:08] Um, research or, um, editing evaluation, um, you know, having it, having it point out things that I might not have thought of, um, grammar checking, that kind of stuff. Um, does it work in Markdown? No, it's just a, it's just a word processor. So, I mean, it's, it's, it's just like any other online word processor with very simple styles. Um, so. Okay.

Allison:
[22:35] The reason I ask about Markdown is because it is a plain text version. I mean, you could probably write Markdown in it, but... But it's actually hard to get Markdown out of Google Docs, which is one of the reasons I don't use it, is you have to put a plugin in in order to extract it.

Adam Engst:
[22:49] I don't know about that. Okay. Yeah, I've long moved away from Markdown. I just find it irritating, so...

Allison:
[22:56] Interesting. Okay. All right. So I've derailed you as you were saying that, but that, again, this is a way of having... Synced files you can still screw up and delete it so not a

Adam Engst:
[23:08] Backup and of course to be clear you know like online stuff is not itself backed up necessarily so yes google or apple or dropbox could lose your data and so you need to think about that if you're gonna you know if you're going to be putting stuff in there that you consider to be absolutely essential you should be backing it up another way, because there's no guarantee they don't screw up your data.

Allison:
[23:37] And you could lose access to it. Lose, you know, something goes wrong with your account, you get hacked, something like that, you could lose it.

Exploring Online Word Processors

Adam Engst:
[23:43] Right. And part of the reason why I don't, I'm not perturbed by like Google Docs and Lex and things like that for what I'm writing is that everything I write is ephemeral. That as soon as I post it in WordPress, then it's fixed. But while I'm writing, I'm writing drafts. I mean, I move stuff over when I'm done.

Allison:
[24:00] Right. And you've got, that's a backup of sorts. It exists online.

Adam Engst:
[24:06] I mean, yeah, there's lots of, right. Archive.org. I could never really recreate tidbits from my word processor files, but yeah. But there are backups of my website as well, you know, and there's the Internet Archive and blah, blah, blah. So, yeah, there's lots of ways you can think about backups. But so, anyway, so what all this triggered was me saying, well, gee, how many people are still relying on bootable backups? And I didn't want to just ask a simple question like that because people want to tell you about their backup strategies. Let me tell you. They have their strategy, and wow, are they right. So the poll I did basically said, which of these backup methods would you be able to use to recover your data and get back to work?

Allison:
[24:57] Let me break in and make an ad for Adam because he's just far too humble to do this himself. If you go to talk.tidbits.com, if you go to make a comment on anything on Tidbits, it takes you into this forum. And it's a terrific community where lots of discussion goes on. I find all kinds of fantastic information in there. And that's where you did a poll.

Engaging with the Tidbits Community

Adam Engst:
[25:17] Yeah. Yeah, Discourse, the web software we use on the back end for Tidbits Talk, is wonderful and has this polling capability built in. And so, you know, people can vote in the poll and then go tell you all about why they voted the way I did and how my poll is not quite right for their situation.

Allison:
[25:34] I already have my list, by the way, to talk to you about as soon as you're done talking about it.

Adam Engst:
[25:38] See? The one – and not unreasonably. The problem is discourse. Once you've set a poll and there's gotten votes, you can't change the text of the poll without losing all the votes.

Allison:
[25:49] Okay.

Adam Engst:
[25:50] Right. Which makes sense. But I was like, okay, fine. So, the various things that I came up with were, you know, like, do you use versioned backups? So, versioned backups where you're getting, like, every time the backup runs, you get a new version of files that have changed since the previous one. Time Machine is the most obvious example of that.

Allison:
[26:16] Right.

Adam Engst:
[26:18] And so that was what I expected to be the primary answer, and indeed was correct. I mean, Time Machine is a good system, and Apple has done a pretty good job with Time Machine. People have issues with it, but on the whole, it works, and people use it. And there's a few other ways of doing version backups that are less common, but people do use. Nightly, I said nightly duplicates. I like to use the word duplicate rather than backup. Just because lots of things are a backup, but a duplicate means literally my

Survey Insights on Backup Methods

Adam Engst:
[26:51] drive cloned or, you know, replicated at a point in time.

Allison:
[26:57] Right. As opposed to, well, both can be true. You can have a duplicate that is also a version backup. Because I answered yes to both of those.

Adam Engst:
[27:08] Yeah, Carbon Copy Cloner can do a little bit of that.

Allison:
[27:10] That's exactly what I was thinking about. So I do Carbon Copy Cloner, and all of a sudden one day I was like, oh man, I really should do Time Machine because I wanted that older file. Oh, look, Carbon Copy Cloner's been doing that for me.

Adam Engst:
[27:21] Yeah, so I mean, right. So again, and that's partly why I tried to make it about the backups rather than the apps. Yeah, yeah. So you could legitimately say, yes, I have versioned and I have duplicates. Within a single program. So the other thing, one of the mistakes that I made was saying nightly duplicates in the text because, yeah, we went back and forth. And people are like, oh, well, I do mine weekly. I'm like, well, that's silly. Why do you do that?

Allison:
[27:53] Or, no, I do mine during the day.

Adam Engst:
[27:56] Oh, yeah, then there's the manual ones. I'm like, okay, fine. So the reason why I wrote nightly And the reason why I'm dubious of the weekly or the monthly or the whenever I feel like it manually.

Allison:
[28:11] The manual ones, you don't even get to be in this. Go ahead and answer none. I don't make any backups if you're going to say that.

Adam Engst:
[28:17] So, yeah, manual backups, just so people understand, the problem with them is, and this is sort of the problem with weekly and monthly as well for many people, is that you need to take yourself out of the equation.

Allison:
[28:32] 100%.

Adam Engst:
[28:32] There cannot be room for human error. And so every time you, the manual backups are like, oh, well, I forgot, or I was sick, or I was traveling, or whatever. The problem is you can't not have a backup because you failed to do something. Computers do this for us. That's why we have them.

Allison:
[28:54] And so they should back themselves up. I like your adamant approach to this because I agree with you 100%. I mean, it's like saying, you know, ask me how many drinks I have each night. I think it's one number, and I bet it's another number, right? Because we're so good at fooling ourselves. You know, how much do I weigh?

Adam Engst:
[29:13] Absolutely.

Allison:
[29:14] Go leave my driver's license to find out. There's a good joke. You know, we lie to ourselves all the time. And so you know you're lying to yourself if you say you're going to do it. Or I drive a backup drive to my mom's house. Yeah, you probably do.

Adam Engst:
[29:31] How often? Yep. Yeah. So that's, I mean, and we'll get to that too.

Manual Backups: A Risky Choice

Adam Engst:
[29:36] But so the weekly and the monthly is sort of the same problem because, well, are you plugging in the drive weekly or monthly? Or is it always plugged in? And if it's always plugged in, why aren't you just updating the damn thing every night? You know, like.

Allison:
[29:51] No reason not to. Yeah. No reason. Yeah, if it's monthly, you know that's a case of someone who says they're plugging it in. And they probably are sometimes.

Adam Engst:
[30:00] And it's a little bit of the same thing with people who insist, like, so Time Machine, the way Time Machine works is it backs up every hour, saves backups for those, the hourly for 24 hours, saves the daily for seven days, saves the weekly for a month. And it's always keeping one. But so, some people are like, oh, I don't want Time Machine backing up all the time. I'm going to reschedule it with utilities not written by Apple for this. Bad idea. Don't do it. Do not mess with what Apple has designed. All you're doing is asking for your backups to break.

Allison:
[30:34] Let me defend that a little bit. I think that started happening because our data got really big and the spinning hard drives were so slow that you weren't finished with one before the next one would try to kick in. But now with SSDs, you know, save yourself some sanity, buy an SSD, you know, sell a kidney if you have to make it. Because now my backups are just like, yeah, I don't care because it's done so quickly. I don't have to worry about it. But even carbon copycoder took like an hour in the old days.

Adam Engst:
[31:03] Yeah, there is some of that. And yeah, we can certainly talk about that, but too. But like, because yeah, right. Spinning hard drives, they're just too slow. That you don't think, well, oh, just to get back to that, do not ever make a bootable backup to a hard drive. You literally cannot use a Mac in the modern world booted from a hard drive. It will not work well enough to function.

Allison:
[31:30] Well, you won't live long enough for it to boot up. We know that.

Adam Engst:
[31:35] It's just so slow.

Allison:
[31:37] I do want to make a correction on something we've been saying. We've been calling it Carbon Copy Cloner, and Mike Bombich renamed it CCC Backup because of this clone thing. So it's actually called CCC Backup. If you look at it in the menu bar, it says Carbon Copy Cloner, but he calls it CCC Backup.

Adam Engst:
[31:53] Why did he do that? I haven't heard that.

Allison:
[31:55] I'll double check that. I believe that's true. Yeah.

Adam Engst:
[32:03] So, yeah. So, basically, try not to mess with systems. You want them to be as simple and complete as possible. So, it's the same thing. some people are like oh i want to select exactly what to back up don't you don't you will make a mistake you want to take yourself out of the equation back everything up um you know drive space is cheap um even ssds really not very expensive at this point there's no kidneys involved at this point i mean you can buy a you know a couple of terabytes ssd for a couple hundred bucks um and um the other the other advantage of ssds for for backup drives is you don't have to Listen to them.

Allison:
[32:46] Yeah.

Adam Engst:
[32:46] There's that. I have a couple of hard drives for archive data here at my systems, and I turn them on every two weeks so that they can back up via Backblaze. And I'm like, oh, that's annoying. I have to listen to damn things for a couple hours.

Allison:
[33:00] When the house catches on fire, too.

Adam Engst:
[33:03] Yeah, yeah. Those SSDs, really nice.

Allison:
[33:06] I think you're right, by the way. I think it is still called Carbon Copy Cloner. I heard wrong. Thank you for doubting me.

The Value of Off-Site Backups

Adam Engst:
[33:17] It's a problem with branding. Once you've stuck yourself with a name, you've got it forever. So, yeah. But the internet backups, actually, also another one I should have changed. I wrote internet backups in my poll, and I should have said off-site backups. And the problem was I wanted to be specific because I personally think that off-site physical backups are too dangerous.

Allison:
[33:45] What do you mean by physical backups? You mean like drive it to grandma's?

Adam Engst:
[33:49] Physical backups, literally taking the drive to your mother's house.

Allison:
[33:50] Okay.

Adam Engst:
[33:52] And too dangerous simply because, again, you're putting yourself in the equation. And are you really going to remember to move the drive every day, week, month, whatever your schedule is that's sufficient? And it just feels to.

Allison:
[34:08] Me like… What's called the sneaker net backups?

Adam Engst:
[34:10] Sneaker net, yeah. I think sneaker net backups are a bad idea. I mean, obviously, they're better than nothing. Sure. But, you know, they are not as good as something that happens all the time. So, I like Backblaze. It backs up all the time. I pay no attention to it. It also does versioning. It's just always backing up. It also does versioning. And you.

Allison:
[34:30] Pay a little

Adam Engst:
[34:31] Extra to get- For a limited amount for 30 days. Yeah.

Allison:
[34:34] I want to say they increased that, but- you would

Adam Engst:
[34:38] You can buy more.

Allison:
[34:38] But i thought they um i'll look it up i thought i remembered thinking oh i gotta get around to paying for that i really do want more but more versioning and then finding out that they did

Adam Engst:
[34:47] You can pay for a year um or pay for unlimited i forget which but yeah it's 30 days by default um i'm not too perturbed about that no sorry my.

Allison:
[34:56] No sorry this time i'm right yes personal backup for 99 a year now has uh one year version history oh

Adam Engst:
[35:04] Okay one year version history Because it's improved. That's really good. I have not been.

Allison:
[35:08] Yeah.

Adam Engst:
[35:09] It is. I wasn't too perturbed about the 30 days because after 30 days, I'm not going to usually go back to a version. I mean, I want the file back, but nothing's changed in that 30 days where I'm like, oh, wow, the one that was 31 days, that's the one I want.

Allison:
[35:26] You know, the

Adam Engst:
[35:26] Other thing about Backblaze— But a year's better than 30 days, fine.

Allison:
[35:28] Yeah. The other thing about Backblaze is it's really, really fast. I had on the order of like, I think it was like 1.3 terabytes of data when I switched to them and it was done in a couple of days. No, no, sorry. It was done in like 16 hours. So it is a fire hose you can shove at that thing. So I was able to do a full test of how well it worked. And these guys just, I'm not advertising for them, but they will ship you a hard drive with your data if anything goes wrong. And they FedEx it overnight. And you send it back to them, and it doesn't cost you anything. And my friend Pat Dangler tested it just to see what happened, and it worked exactly as they said. I mean, geez. And you have off-site access to your data, so you can log in to backblaze.com and see it, and go to your file structure and get a file. I have nothing but wonderful things to say about Backblaze.

Adam Engst:
[36:23] And the other thing, one thing to keep in mind about Backblaze, and you were talking about the data, someone posted, again, Ron Risley, posted how he tested he was doing some kind of test to amazon's amazon s3 storage or something like that with some you know other backup app and he did a test of a couple files and they came back really slowly um and he thought that oh it was probably just uh related to you know like you know finding those two files in the whole big system or anything like that but it turns out it was just slow right so so one of the things that's important to do with any backup system is to test it to make sure you can actually recover, and in the case of an online one, make sure you can test it to recover quickly enough. I mean, obviously, the Backblaze one, you can always get the hard drive.

Evaluating Online Backup Services

Allison:
[37:11] Yeah, it is not quick to even traverse the directory to bring it up. It can take many, many minutes to just see where the files are.

Adam Engst:
[37:21] Yeah, it's not super quick that way, but I think, you know, actually when you're retrieving the data, my experience, I've tested that a few times, my experience is that's pretty quick once it starts transferring. Okay, that's good. But also with Backblaze, you're probably not getting something back that you can restore via Migration Assistant. So basically, that's much more of a, like, I'm going to bring data back to a functioning system, not that I'm going to rebuild a system using Backblaze data.

Allison:
[37:54] Why?

Adam Engst:
[37:56] So the reason is, is that Backblaze intentionally doesn't back up certain things like applications. And to reduce storage space and transmission time. And someone just posted about this. They apparently asked support, and support's like, I don't know, we don't really do that. That's not our thing. Our thing is, you want your data, we're going to put it back where you tell us to put it back. So it's basically put my files here, as opposed to sort of put all my files here, and then I'm going to point migration assistant at it.

Allison:
[38:31] Okay. I thought it did do applications. I'm checking right now, just in case. But I thought it did.

Adam Engst:
[38:38] It has a bunch of things that it tries to not do, and you might be able to override some of those.

Allison:
[38:42] Look at that. Starts right at users under Macadosh Rdisk, so I don't think I'm right. Shockingly, Adam Angst is right.

Adam Engst:
[38:51] Two! We keep score.

Allison:
[38:54] No, I got one, though.

Adam Engst:
[38:56] You got one, yeah. Two to one right now. Okay, two to one. Best out of five, you know.

Allison:
[39:01] So by doing this survey, what did you learn by asking the question? Was it the discussion that you enjoyed about it or was it the actual graph of the way people answered?

Adam Engst:
[39:16] I think I was impressed by how varied strategies were. I think that most people who have put the time and thought into developing a strategy that they're then going to tell us about are probably fine. Because this is a little bit like one of those behavioral economics things. Like, if you're the sort of person who thinks about backups, you'll be protected.

User Strategies for Backing Up

Adam Engst:
[39:44] Um the um and so so it was kind of interesting that way to me i mean like there were more people doing physical you know sneaker net backups off-site backups than i expected um i've always thought that was a complete non-starter of a of an approach just just being too much trouble and back in the hard days hard drive days you know like you move hard drives around it's not good for them um i mean the ssds are at least more more physically reliable um more people used cloud storage than I were not considered.

Allison:
[40:13] That a backup

Adam Engst:
[40:16] Well that's why I said return to work because it really is about returning to work the goal of a backup is not to have a backup the goal is to get back to work and so cloud storage and a second Mac really are important for getting back to work pretty quick that's.

Allison:
[40:37] In the case of a some sort of disaster though that's not I deleted a file problem.

Adam Engst:
[40:44] Yes. Yeah. Well, you delete a file. You go to Time Machine or version backup for that.

Allison:
[40:48] Yeah. Unless you're just depending on cloud storage.

Adam Engst:
[40:53] Uh no because you delete a file and cloud storage has gone everywhere potentially that's what i mean yeah yeah right right so but that's why you want to be backing those things up as well and so but you know i mean i guess what i find a little funny about the whole like how i deleted a file is that how often do you up to your trash i.

Allison:
[41:13] Let hazel do it for me so

Adam Engst:
[41:15] I don't know i mean i i mean i don't i don't have an automated have it automated but you know like i probably do it I don't know, once every month or two or something like that? I don't know. The point being that that's the whole point of the trash is that you don't delete files instantly. Now, to be fair, you know, it's easy to overwrite a file, for instance, like by using the name or you like, you know, it says replace and you said okay when you should have said cancel, that kind of thing. So it's possible to do this kind of stuff. But my experience of the version backups is that it's a little bit of, I don't know, just like thoughtful computer use just avoids the need for them.

Allison:
[41:57] Right, right. I'm going to offer another solution that I don't know whether anybody answered. My father-in-law will be 90 in a couple of months, and he taught us something really interesting. He got us safe for keeping things safe, like his passport and all that important and paperwork and everything, but he made a point of figuring out that a regular fire safe is good to keep paper from burning. Adam, what temperature does paper burn at?

Adam Engst:
[42:28] 451.

Allison:
[42:29] Yes, and we all know that. Fahrenheit 451 because of the book. So, there are fire safes, but it turns out a hard drive or a thumb drive will burn at a much, much lower temperature. So, his backup strategy, and he is the only person on earth I would ever say can do sneaker net successfully. He changes a file on his desktop, he sticks in his thumb drive, he drags the entire directory over because he doesn't know you can do it a file at a time. He unplugs that thumb drive, He walks over and he sticks it in his safe. He does it every single time. So he has a daily backup that he keeps in his safe, and he's really, really good at that. But I thought it was an interesting idea that maybe you've got a frozen point in time that you want to put a drive into a safe. Make sure it's an electronics fire safe so it will not burn at a much lower temperature.

Adam Engst:
[43:16] Yeah, they also call them like data backup safes, I think, sometimes when you're searching for them.

Allison:
[43:22] It's one of my favorite things I've ever bought.

Adam Engst:
[43:23] The other one, of course, is the offside is the safe deposit box.

Allison:
[43:26] Yeah, but it turned out safe deposit box cost a lot of money. We had a little one. It was $80 a year, and for like $130, we got this safe. We've been making bank for the last five years because of this. And plus, when I need my passport, it's right there. When I need cash, it's right there. I'm not telling you where my safe is, by the way. But we can get to everything instantly now. It's a much better way to go.

Adam Engst:
[43:50] So I assume it's perfectly hidden under like, you know, the floorboard that you can't tell is actually removable and that kind of stuff.

Allison:
[43:57] It's also bolted down so you can't get to it from the inside. So, I mean, you could tear out the floor maybe, but that's about it.

Lessons from Data Recovery Services

Adam Engst:
[44:05] So one of the things actually worth mentioning, again, just I saw the PR come through DriveSavers, the company that will restore data from thoroughly damaged storage devices, is providing free data recovery services for people affected by the Los Angeles wildfires. Oh, that's wonderful. Now, they're pretty clear about how the heat of some of these wildfires is rendering things completely unrecoverable.

Allison:
[44:31] Yeah. But. Yeah.

Adam Engst:
[44:33] But. But just in case…, Just in case, like, if something wasn't thoroughly damaged, if it's just a little melted looking on the outside, they might be able to get it back. So, in any event, just wanted to mention that because it's worthwhile. So, I did actually, your father-in-law reminds me that I did actually ask about manual backups via the Finder, you know, dragging files. Only 10% of the people who responded to the survey said they did that. I was a little surprised it was that high, honestly. But that might be additive.

Allison:
[45:01] Remember, so, like, I answered five of the six options. you gave me so it doesn't mean i don't do one of them it the way you did the survey it's hard to tell you it's hard

Adam Engst:
[45:11] To no way to tell yeah yeah um and so so so the main thing is is that that should not be your only way of backing up you know you might have the file like your your novel or something like that you're like yeah i want another copy of it on this thumb drive which i'm going to carry in my pocket you know like every day you know that's how i'm gonna i'm gonna make sure You know, sure. Okay. You know, that's fine. It's mainly important that it not be your only way of backing up because, again, you are failable.

Allison:
[45:42] Yeah. Oh, yeah. That's got to be your tertiary or quadruciary, if there's a word like that. One of the other things I did, we keep certain kinds of information on our synology that we don't want in the cloud anywhere. Financial data. And also, like, I back up all my audio files from the podcast. And who cares? There's copies everywhere. I could retrieve all of that back. But when I got a new Synology, I put my old Synology at my buddy Ron's house, who is in the same fire zone, same earthquake zone as us, but what are you going to do? And he's got a great connection, and I run backups between the two of those. So for that stuff that just is inappropriate for that, I found yet another way to do it. And that's something you can do with other tools.

Adam Engst:
[46:25] I was very unhappy when CrashPlan sort of turned its back on the consumer market, because one of the things that CrashPlan had was you could have backup buddies, where you would just put a drive at each other's house and CrashPlan would do backups to your drive at their house and vice versa. I thought that was absolutely brilliant and a great way to do stuff.

Allison:
[46:46] Yeah, it would seem like maybe somebody like Backblaze could have that as a, if you pay for our service, then we will also let you back up to Adam's house.

Adam Engst:
[46:56] Yeah, yeah. I mean, in CrashPlan, you know, again, you had to pay for their service, but it was an alternative. But yeah, when they went enterprise only, that all went away.

Allison:
[47:07] Yeah, I was very sure about that.

Adam Engst:
[47:08] So I was pleased to see that this was the correct answer. Zero people said, I don't make any backups.

Allison:
[47:15] I hope that's not self-selecting.

Adam Engst:
[47:18] Oh, it's totally self-selecting. That's the problem. What this says is tidbits readers make backups. Tidbits readers who respond to surveys make backups.

Allison:
[47:27] There you go. Tidbits readers who read articles about backups and answer surveys, none of them are not doing backups, right?

Adam Engst:
[47:35] Precisely. That said, I think there are, unfortunately, way too many people who do not make backups. It's as simple as that.

Allison:
[47:44] Apple has made it so easy for us. Like you plug anything into your Mac, it's going, hey, can I run a backup on that for you? Just in case, you know, you'd have to be not paying any attention whatsoever to not notice that it could do it for you.

Adam Engst:
[48:00] But simultaneously, I mean, there's two things Apple does well. So the real Apple's better about the iPhones and iPads, right? You can do backups of those very easily, particularly if you have iCloud storage. You don't have to do anything. It just works. Once you're backing up to your iPhone or your iPad to your Mac, it's just fussier.

Apple's Backup Solutions

Adam Engst:
[48:24] And yes, it works and you can do it. But I would be curious, actually, how many people do one versus the other. But it feels to me like, you know, it's just seamless if you back up to iCloud. But Apple has nothing like that. They don't have Time Machine for iCloud. Just think about how many more people would pay for iCloud storage if you could point Time Machine at iCloud.

Allison:
[48:47] I don't think I have enough money to pay for iCloud storage for... I mean, I'm already back. Well, actually, no, no, that's not a true statement. Your photos are...

Adam Engst:
[48:57] Yeah, that's where you've got your photos. And so, I mean, I pay for two terabytes and it's 10 bucks a month. And they have, what is it, eight and six, eight and 12 terabyte plans now.

Allison:
[49:10] Yeah, I ended up having to go up a branch because I convinced my whole family to back everything and put everything up in documents and desktop, except for Steve. Steve doesn't believe in it. He's got Backblaze and he doesn't care that the stuff's not on his other Mac. and i don't understand why he doesn't back up his laptop which is interesting he says i don't do anything there i don't care about it's fine

Adam Engst:
[49:32] So so in fact i i understand that because i actually like my my mem my m1 macbook air um is completely a secondary mac um and you know um and i have you know desktop and document syncing and um i back it up via time machine every so often, because realistically i just don't care you know right i mean it's got a lot of random stuff on it, yeah you know it's just like you know like that machine i don't need to use it basically ever um unless i'm traveling and um and so you know it's like as i said i you know like i don't change the i don't change the apps on it hardly ever so like if i had to restore um if i had to restore you know old files i mean the only things that are really written to the hard drive that don't go in desktop or documents as downloads and who cares if you lose your downloads folder right so, yeah so so so i do understand you know like there's a certain level of there are machines which are in essence dumb terminals yeah.

Allison:
[50:38] Yeah that's a good description of it you know i keep thinking that steve's wrong in doing this because he's not doing it the way i'm doing it but and i keep thinking oh that's gonna bite you sometime and then i watch him get a new laptop and he doesn't restore from anything. He just sits down and he starts using it. It's like, well, come on, you can't be doing it right because it's not the way I'm doing it.

Adam Engst:
[50:58] And, you know, I mean, and part of the problem is, you know, people, people like us who install all sorts of stuff, restoring that sometimes is good because it saves you having to do a little configuration. Other times you're like, oh, man, I just want to start clean. You know, like I'll reinstall things because then, I mean, I know we've talked about this before. Like I have the list of stuff I need to reinstall. And realistically, I'll reinstall everything when I was like, oh, how come I don't have such and such? Oh, OK, let me reinstall that. You know, so it's not the end of the world.

Allison:
[51:25] I always say it's like cleaning out your closet. Take everything out and put back what you actually use. Don't try to take out what you don't. But Howard Oakley broke my heart when he did an article, Eclectic Light, by the way, is his website. He did an article talking about how everyone who's still doing clean backups, a nuke and pave, he says, you're just wasting your time. You're not actually fixing anything. I think that's not true of the only put back what you actually use people, but in general, doing it from scratch, he says, you don't need to do that anymore. You're fine.

Adam Engst:
[52:01] I mean, that's the signed system volume, right? Like, it cannot be, it is immutable. Like, it just is. Like, there is no way it can change. And so, you know, if your Mac is booting, it's immutable. Like, you know, it cannot have been corrupted or messed up in any way because that's required for the cryptographic seals to maintain intact.

Allison:
[52:24] Yeah, so you're not fixing that kind of cruft kind of a problem. The cruft that you intentionally added to your user volume, that's all on you, right?

Adam Engst:
[52:36] Yeah, yeah, precisely. So that you do have some stuff you'll have to get rid of that way as well, but any of it.

Allison:
[52:42] All right. Well, hey, this has been fun. I think it's a topic that is certainly evergreen, comes up from time to time, but it's in this context with between the fires. And I really appreciate understanding the ASR bug and the changes that might be coming or not coming, really valuable to learn. Like I said, I had read your article, but it was a while ago and my brain was a little bit full from CES. And I think that fell out the other side as things do. So I really appreciate the conversation. This was fun.

Adam Engst:
[53:11] Yeah, yeah. Always good to go over this stuff. And I mean, until I mean, in some ways, no one's done it, right? Even Apple could could change the world by just saying, we are backing up everything on your machine to the to the cloud. All you do is push this button. I mean, it's sort of what they did with the iPhone, but you still got to pay for extra storage and stuff like that.

Closing Thoughts on Backup Strategies

Adam Engst:
[53:29] If they did that, backup would just cease to be a problem, because it would just always happen. Um you know of course people are going to say oh i don't trust the cloud blah blah blah blah but you know again this gets back into the level of cryptography involved and everything along those lines so if it's set up right there's really really no concern on this until you're at the the government spook level right.

Allison:
[53:50] Right and i i like that we've got competition with the three companies you've talked about i'm sure there's more out there between uh carbon copy cloner and super duper and chronosync we've got some terrific vendors that have been around i mean these people but these devs have been around for a long time. They know what they're doing. This stuff works really well. All right, if people want to find your work, they go to tidbits.com and then go find the Tidbits Talk and have a good time over there. Right, Adam?

Adam Engst:
[54:18] Absolutely. Basically, all the comments on the articles are at Tidbits Talk, but they show up below the article and if you click on any of them, you'll bounce over to Tidbits Talk straight so you can make your own comments. Tell us what you think, your backup strategy, and why we're wrong and you're right.

Allison:
[54:32] Please, somebody go over and tell them that you don't do any backups. I'd like to see that.

Adam Engst:
[54:37] I've already taken the screenshot. No, no one can do that.

Allison:
[54:40] Too late. All right. Thanks a lot for coming on. We'll see you again next time.

Supporting Chit Chat Across the Pond

Adam Engst:
[54:44] Next time it is. Thanks for having me.

Allison:
[54:46] I hope you enjoyed this episode of Chit Chat Across the Pond. Did you notice there weren't any ads in the show? That's because this show is not ad supported. It's supported by you. If you learned something or maybe you were just entertained, consider contributing to the Podfeet podcast. You can do that by going over to podfeed.com and look for the big red button that says support the show. When you click that button, you're going to find different ways to contribute. You can donate one time through the big donate button with a credit card or Apple Pay, or you can use PayPal. If you want to make a recurring contribution, click the Patreon button. Keep in mind, I don't charge Patreon for chitchat across the pond or programed by stealth episodes just once a month for the NoCillaCast. That keeps it simple. If you want to contact me for any reason, you can email me at alisonandpodfeed.com and you can follow me on Mastodon at podfeed.com slash Mastodon.

Music:
[55:38] Music

Artist:	Allison Sheridan
Album:	Chit Chat Across the Pond
Year:	2025
URL:	https://podfeet.com

CCATP_2025_01_14

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