TheBouncer wrote:
I looked at several sites and took the lower numbers some tests are showing 150 read 145 write.
The only test that matters is the one that you run on your devices. Time Machine does a lot of extra file comparisons and other work. But you can easily connect to your NAS over standard networking and transfer a very large files. That’s your maximum transfer rate. I can virtually guarantee that it won’t get close to 150 MB/s.
The very first initial full backup would probably take weeks, but once the full backup was done it would be incremental backups from that point forward. However now I see the error in that idea as that backup would contain the Time Machine Backup which is constantly changing and would not be able to be incrementally backed up. So going forward It seems the local drive like you suggested would be best for time machine and then have a separate cloud backup of data only, not Time machine. That way incremental backups would work.
I mentioned this above. Time Machine is going to use a file structure called a “sparse bundle”. This stores a disk image using many small files. When you update a small part of the virtual disk, only the files that contain that data are made dirty and will need to be updated. It is still an incremental backup, as far as networking goes. There is extra work that the computer needs to do in order to present all of those small files as if they were one disk. But the network data transfers are so slow that your computer has plenty of time to do any of that extra disk virtualization work.
Would a cloning software such as Clonezilla or Carbon Copy Cloner be a better choice than time machine ? Would it be a smaller faster restore using these ?
This is not a Time Machine vs. 3rd party question. A network operations are slow. There is no way around that. 3rd party tools are currently unable to create a bootable restore volume. But then, restoring to a bootable system with Time Machine over a network is going to be a challenge too.
This is a problem that is 100% solved using Time Machine and a little money. Problems like that are not problems.
Having a networked backup does offer some conveniences. For example, if you had a very large NAS and many Macs with a relatively small amount of storage, it can be a very convenient way to keep all machines backed up all the time. This is not a substitute for a local backup. It is a convenience for files that are accidentally deleted or recent files that weren’t backed-up locally. Because it is networked, it can connect and run whenever it wants. Local backups always have to be plugged in first. People who are always on the go might miss a few days and eventually get reminded after 10. That is not a problem for network backups. I just wouldn’t recommend a network backup as the only backup for your computer that has a very large amount of storage.
It’s too late now, but if you ever did need to take your computer in for service again, assuming they didn’t replace or erase the hard drive entirely, you could restore your system in seconds using a local snapshot. But if you are getting the screen replaced, or the keyboard replaced (both popular repairs in recent years) try the local snapshot first. Only restore from Time Machine if the local snapshot isn’t possible.
