SDXC card slot on the Mac Studio

SD card for backups? Try it. Let us know.

SD cards using SLC flash tends to be around 100,00 writes, while MLC and TLC flash provides less, and somewhere in the range of 500 to 3000 writes before failure, or 10,000 writes or less. And this being storage and storage endurance specs tending to be aspirational, and with some products further involving marginal or cheaply-made storage, I wouldn’t bet on these numbers holding.

Some related reading: https://media.kingston.com/pdfs/MKF_283.1_Flash_Memory_Guide_EN.pdf

1 TB is a fairly small hard disk drive these days, with some projects installing 12 TB HDDs for archival storage.

Time Machine doesn’t work all that well with low freespace, too.

Might also want to consider the costs of data loss here too, and how that factors into how much you want to spend on backups and backup storage. I tend to prefer two parallel Time Machine backups, or potentially more, for most data. Higher-value data gets more backups and gets off-site backups.

One other consideration for backups is that an SD card is almost certainly going to wander off with a stolen machine, if you’re not manually cycling cards through the SD slot. That’s easy to do, but can be hard to do consistently.

It’s your data, of course, so do let us know how long the SD card backups here last.

Not really a good idea either because Time Machine requires a lot of space and could corrupt other data on the drive. Ideally you should use one external drive for Time Machine and one external drive for additional storage.

It could, but it is a poor idea. If you need more storage space, you should use a more reliable external hard drive.

You’re welcome.