iMac security and privacy

TimeMachine is designed to be as foolproof as possible. It backs up the entire internal hard drive unless you open its preferences and tell it to ignore specific folders. It can even back up any external hard drive that’s connected. If you have 2 external drives connected (1 being the TM drive) just open TM preferences and make sure the 2nd drive isn’t listed in the omit list. (Also make sure your TM drive is large enough. My rule of thumb is to add up the size of all the files I’m backing up, add a bit more to account for growth over the next 18 months, and then at least double it. That’s the smallest drive you should buy for your TM backup.

There’s no reason to worry about the drive being in use when you put the computer to sleep. The Mac OS is robust enough to deal with that occurrence - one that happens much more often than you might expect. Similarly TM is usually able to pick up right where it left off if you put the computer to sleep. Every once in a while TM will get confused and you might realize that a backup is stalled. IF this happens just open TM preferences and turn it off. Open the TM drive, open the backups.backupdb folder, open the folder inside that represents your computer and sort the list of backups by date. You’ll see a file called inprogress - delete it, empty the trash, turn TM back on, and manually initiate a backup from the TM menubar item. That should do it. To give you an idea of how robust TM is, one of my desktop TM drives has backups going back to 2012 when I purchased my new iMac.

TimeMachine is a file based backup system so in most bases if you have deleted or fouled up a file and you want to retrieve an older version from TM, you enter TimeMachine, navigate to the folder where the file is located (or in some cases you might select an entire folder if you deleted an important folder), tell TM to restore it and then select the location to copy the file/folder to. In a few instances though TM works a bit differently. Photos, for example, by default keeps a monolithic package of all your photos and edits. If you need to retrieve a photo you can’t really use TM to find just that photo. You retrieve the entire Photos library. (Yeah, not optimal but there are some good reasons for this.) Mail is another program where the usual way doesn’t work. For Mail you open TM in the Mail program and then look back in time at the Mail database.

I don’t consider cloud based backups to be a good idea. Forget the possibility of the company going bankrupt or being breached. Unless you live where fiberoptic allows for hard drive like Internet speeds, retrieving lots of data from a cloud backup is just too slow. On good days I can download about 4GB an hour. My desktop internal drive has about 115GB of data. About 380GB of data and applications. I don’t have that long to wait for my computer to be ready.

To recap: Keep your TM drive plugged in all the time. Don’t overthink it. Bad things happen, that’s why you back up and want to do it frequently. Backups do go bad that’s why you want more than one. But it is possible to overthink it. Knock on wood, since that first disaster back around 1990 I’ve experienced many drive failures of various types. I’ve lost some time as a result but I’ve lost no data.

My schedule is letting my Time Machine backup when it's supposed to, i.e. hourly. The clone does its job at 2:30 AM, it normally takes about 15 minutes. The first backup for both is the longest as they are backing up everything.

You would need to send your suggestion into Apple, www.apple.com/feedback.

I keep all my EHDs connected 24/7.

FileVault is handy if you have a notebook or if you are using the computer in a location that isn't protected - an office or a dorm room. If it is in your home and you aren't worried about people in the house snooping you probably are ok to not use it. Still, if you had a nosy guest or someone stole the computer, what sensitive information might they glean? I've personally experienced no disasters with FileVault but I do have multiple backups should disaster occur. If you are interested in my multi-layered back system I'll be glad to share it.

Most experienced users create redundant backups because backups can fail too. I've seen it myself when my internal drive crashed and when I went to restore the only backup I had crashed while I was unaware. This happened many years ago now and but it cost me a lot in terms of lost irreplaceable data such as photos.

What many users do is they use Time Machine on one external HD and then on a totally separate External Hard Disk they use a bootable clone app such as SuperDuper! or Carbon Copy Cloner. Both do the same thing and one is not "better" than the other. They both cost less than $50 and are invaluable. What a bootable clone does is it creates a clone of your internal drive, so if the internal drive goes down, you can boot from the clone. This is something Time Machine cannot do. I have my SuperDuper! software setup to only backup changed files at about 2:30 a.m. daily. I have Time Machine set to run normally.

As a matter of added precaution I check both backups about 1x a months (takes less than 5 minutes) to verify each backup is working okay.

This extra added level of backup ensures my data stays secure and gives me peace of mind in the event my computer goes down, if it does I have backup I can rely on to restore when it's time.

TimeMachine is a convenient start it and forget about it backup system, especially for desktops (because the TM drive is always plugged in) but when your drive dies or gets corrupted TM takes time to get your computer back on task. If you just don’t have time to wait for TM to restore your drive, having a clone is a life saver. You can immediately boot with the clone (which may be a bit out of date, or not) and get right back to work. You can restore later. But that clone backup isn’t a backup if you boot with it, it is your primary and what if it dies? And what if all your backups are destroyed in a fire or the crook who steals your computer takes the drives too?

My scheme uses multiple TimeMachine drives. One drive is plugged in all week and in use while the other is locked in my desk at work. On Friday I take the home drive into work and at the end of the day take the work drive home. Repeat and rinse 😀. Worst case I have a TM drive at work that is at worst, one week old. I use CarbonCopyCloner to clone my boot drive to two different drives every evening. There are many cloning applications, one reason I like CCC is that it has a safety net feature which saves the changes so the clone is exactly the same as the boot drive but documents that were deleted or edited since the last cloned backup are saved in a Safety Net folder so if I need to go back to a previous document and TimeMachine can’t do it, the clone should be able to.

This may sound stupidly redundant but some years ago I had a client go bankrupt because the building his business was in burned down. His computer, his backups, and his paper copies were all destroyed. I personally experienced a catastrophic failure when a lightning strike took out my computer and my backup turned out to be garbage. Thankfully at that point it was merely an inconvenience. Today with tax records, 10+ years of digital photos and movies, and my entire music collection digitally recorded, it would be more that inconvenience.

Besides TimeMachine and CarbonCopyCloner I use one of these docks. Note, I’m not advocating this specific product. But a high quality dock is convenient, it makes swapping the TM drives on Friday a snap and using it as I’ve described only requires a one drive dock but I actually do use both bays of mine, one back for TM and the second for a clone.

The external drives are properly dismounted when you turn off the computer. TM isn’t affected by turning off the computer in the middle of a backup. That said, if you’d prefer, you can cancel a backup manually if you’d prefer.

No, there is nothing that needs to be done if you do a proper shutdown.