Time Machine SSD needs to be backed up

You cannot backup your Time Machine backup disk.

What you can do is use Time Machine to create backups to multiple external disks.

Use Time Machine on your Mac to back up to multiple disks - Apple Support

If you add a second external disk as a destination for backups, Time Machine will alternate between the two drives as it backs up your Mac. Each drive will have the same full backup set and either can be used to recover files if/when necessary. These backups can be done automatically by TM as usual, or you can manually trigger a backup to either drive at any time. This is especially useful if you don't always keep both drives connected to the computer.

As for the status of the drive you are currently using, it sounds like you'll need to erase and reformat it and start a fresh backup set. Sometimes these things happen which is why multiple backups are always recommended if the data is very important to you.

The best backup strategy is one that uses the 3-2-1 method.

That's three copies of the data, using two different means and with one copy kept safely offsite.

Wellfleetian wrote:

Thanks. So there's no way to move what's on the Time Machine drive to another location?

No. Not directly that is. You can of course restore selected items to another location, but not all of them all at once.

What's going on, ...

If that Time Machine backup drive has been operating in a state of failure, that would explain the slow performance you described. Start a new backup set on a new (or previously erased) backup drive. One and only one backup does not comprise a robust backup strategy anyway. Put the other one away until you are confident of that additional backup. Then, you can consider erasing the (assumed) problematic one. Sometimes erasing it will extend its life for years. Or, it may fail again, perhaps very soon. Either way you don't want to rely upon only one.

For Time Machine purposes, SSDs are not particularly advantageous.

Wellfleetian wrote:

Thanks. So there's no way to move what's on the Time Machine drive to another location?

Some users will tell you that it can be done. And while there is a morsel of truth in that, the reality is a bit more complicated.

TM backups are a combination of full file backups done when TM creates its first backup, and then partial file backups as TM continues to do its incremental backups over time and as files are changed. While the data on the TM backup drive may technically be copied, problems may arise later when one tries to use the backup drive properly within TM's recovery interface. There's a lot that TM does to manage backups over what may be years of service.

The Finder app may not properly account for all of the pieces of the files that have been incrementally changed and then backed up to TM's drive, so what you copy using the Finder interface may not be complete. Also, using Finder to manipulate the files on a TM backup drive is to risk corrupting multiple files and even the entire backup set itself.

One may get away with copying some or even many files from a backup drive to another drive, but there is great risk of corrupting the backup set that may never be discovered until one really needs that set to be intact as when disaster strikes.

The bottom line is that there is not a safe way to copy TM backups to another drive.

If backing up your backup is what you wish, then simply add another drive to the TM backup routine.

if I were you then I would read

cloning an external drive - Apple Community

more

macos make a carbon copy of external disc - Google-

Wellfleetian wrote:

How can I back up my external SSD which holds my Time Machine backup.

IMHO sometimes people too much want to keep very old backups or even merge or backup those backups.

If in doubt there is something important in the old backup, the best practice is to archive the old backup disk and just start a new one. Then after a few weeks-months-years recycle the old backup disk if you didn't miss anything from it.

I would not mess with backups because that might corrupt them:

"But as those of us who have had to rely on our backups in the past know, the act of backing up is only the first small step in the full equation — it’s being able to restore that really matters.

Some psychiatrist friends with their own practice once ran afoul of this in a serious way. Their bookkeeper had religiously been making backups of all their invoicing and billing records as she worked, but she had never tried restoring from those backups until her hard drive died. When she went to restore from her carefully prepared backups, she was aghast to discover that they hadn’t been working. Months of data was lost, and it was a huge problem both for the bookkeeper and for my friends.

Therefore, I humbly submit that Friday the 13th, whenever it rolls around, should be considered International Verify Your Backups Day. (The United Nations is welcome to make this official.) If you’re reading this article on some other day, I’d encourage you to verify your backups right away and then continue with the Friday the 13th schedule."

https://tidbits.com/2024/09/13/international-verify-your-backups-day/

Wellfleetian wrote:

Thanks. So there's no way to move what's on the Time Machine drive to another location?

The recommendation is start a new Time Machine Backup on your new drive.

Multiple backups are always a good idea.

SSDs are much faster than hard disk drives, but that speed advantage is lost on Time Machine due to the processing "overhead" it requires. Every backup compares millions of tiny files to determine the changes that need to be written. The ensuing write / read operations occur very quickly, but that comprises only a small fraction of TM's actions.

Cost is another factor. The cost of SSD storage had been trending downward, slowly approaching that of traditional hard disk drives, but the emergence of "AI" with its enormous appetite for memory quickly reversed that trend. Unit costs over the past year or so have doubled or tripled, which can make TM's typically large storage needs (2+ TB) out of reach. Unfortunately that placed renewed pressure on HDDs, whose prices had been steady for years and have now been increasing too.

The advantage of HDDs was the "cheap enough to be disposable" factor, which means you could have several of them — multiple backups. When one fails, throw it out. HDDs also tend to give plenty of advance warning before they become too unreliable to use — they get intolerably slow, often accompanied by mechanical noise. SSDs don't do that.

As far as "cloud" storage is concerned I suppose Carbonite is as good as any other. I used to disparage it because Carbonite did not back up macOS itself (claiming copyright restrictions) meaning you could not completely restore a backed up system... but Time Machine no longer does that anyway.