How do Pros manage backup?

DU only makes a disk image. It can't clone to an external drive that you can boot from directly (which you can with CCC).

deleted

Yes. CCC is easeir to use than Disk Utility and runs incremental backups that are fast. The first time you backup with CCC it will create a bootable full backup. Thereafter it will compare your live disk to the CCC backup and copy over only those files that have changed.

One of CCC's beauties is if your internal SSD crashes you can replace it with a CCC cloned disk and be up and running immediately without having to do a restore.

With CCC will need one backup drive per live drive so to backup and external drive you need a separate backup for it.

You mentioned consolidating all your most-used data on an internal disk instead of your SSD. That would make things simpler. If you go back to an internal disk I would use a 1 TB disk to run internally which will give you lots of room to store what you now store on external disks plus head room to grow. It sounds like you already have a 1 TB disk so you can use that one (after moving the data off of it onto one of your other external disks.)

Then with two 1 TB Time Machine disks (good) or one Time Machine and one CCC backup (better) you will be covered.

Frank,

On the topic of preserving deleted files please see my posting in

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5448899

you still don't realize what some people here are saying, like Frank etc...

your post is "how do pros manage backups"

The genuine question is.--- "How do the pros manage backups and then archive and safeguard their data on another platform because all backups are by definition not secure"

Youve already mentioned you have important picture collections etc.

You can do what a few people have done in the past (with great hindsight regrets),.... they created a NAS array of Multi-Terabyte drives, put 100% of their data there and only there, like a circle of dominos.........

someone gets acess to ONE of them,........whoops, all gone.

AceNeerav India

Like i said in an earlier post on this thread, i might have asked a very open ended question in the first post.

Nahh, youre fine, .....the REAL reason so many people jumped in on this topic is because you asked one of those "hot button" topics people are both often fuzzy on and/or like to debate the "merits of A,......vs. B"

Ask a contentious question that has several perspectives,..... and everyone pokes their heads up like meerkats who "heard something interesting"

Have a dedicated NON networked, NON partitioned HD for your time machine backup. Keep it simple.

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” ― Leonardo da Vinci

"unnecessary complexity is the the purest form of ordered failure" - Syrianus

Tom in London wrote:

DU only makes a disk image. It can't clone to an external drive that you can boot from directly (which you can with CCC).

WRONG! DU will create a bootable clone along with

the Recovery HD by using the Restore function. I

have done this multiple times.

However, CCC is better as it permits incremental changes

once the first clone is created as opposed to DU which is

all or none.

Intermittent failures can be difficult to diagnose. A good strategy is to simplify and attack the problem from the most likely to the lease likely causes.

Good to hear you have simplified the process to a USB-conneted drive. Otherwise we would probably be blaming it on your network.

Time Machine is more prone to failure than simpler backup programs such as Carbon Copy Cloner. However Time Machine rarely exhibits the frequency of failures you are describing unless there is some intermittent hardware glitch involved. It is complex. It does not react well to glitches. Carbon Copy Cloner can avoid intermittent glitches because it is so simple and uses the hardware for much less time.

- Is it hardware or software?

Suspecting the hardware is the first place I usually go. I would try using another inexpensive drive and try substituting that in for the suspected backup drive. (Do not use a drive that has live data.) Avoid drives from Western Digital. Other in this forum may have suggestions on how to diagnose and test the drive but when I have problems with a disk I usually just toss it. They are cheap, disposable commodities compared to the value of your data and your peace of mind. I would substitute in a new drive and try that for a while.

If the problem persists then replace the active hub with a different brand and you might as well purchase a 7-port version. I have seen flaky active hubs but much less often than flaky disks. Hopefully this will take care of the situation.

- Corrupt operating system? (Less likely.)

When there are problems with OS X or its utilities it most often a corrupt version of the software as opposed to a new bug in the software that no one else is reporting. The fix for this is to reinstall OS X over itself. http://support.apple.com/kb/PH10763 However you should have TWO good backups before you try reinstalling the OS. (Catch 22.: You can't reinstall the OS until you have good backups and you might not have good backups until you reinstall the OS.)

- Simplify, simplify, simplify!

Remove the failing Time Machine procedure from this loop; use Carbon Copy Cloner and as at least a temporary procedure make two backups of your system drive. Is I noted CCC is dramatically simpler. Reinstall the OS over itself and then you can covert one of the CCC disks to a Time Machine disk to use test Time Machine again. You can continue using a combination of CCC and Time Machine in case Time Machine fails again. The Time Machine backup will be more current (backed up ever hour) wile the CCC backup will be simpler (backed up as often as you run CCC or daily of you schedule it that way.)

Good luck. May it be as simple as a bad drive that is easy to replace.

I can tell you how I manage backups. To start with, there are two types of problems I try to prevent. One is a hardware failure and the other a software failure. Software problems are from my experience the hardest to deal with and occur the most often. Let's say for some reason you lost a file or a file is corrupt or a program or you installed something that messed with other things....

Raid helps with hardware issues but does nothing for software issues so I don't use it (unless Raid 0 for speed). What I do is run Time machine on one drive, have two external clones ping-ponging 2x per week. Have two external clones ping-ponging 2x per month that get stored remotely. I use CCC (great program) for the clones.

My strategy works pretty well and only once did I need to recover something from the remote clones. You'd think that would never happen but Time machine became corrupt and a missing folder had already migrated to the on-site clones. Only my remote clones had a copy and then only 1 of the 2.

My system is not perfect but it is redundant. With TM I can go back and look for old files and with my clones I can go back 30 days in case of emergency. Hardware loss is very very easy to deal with. The downside of my strategy is the 30 day limit on disasters and the fact that I must bring home a remote drive every 2 weeks and then take it back to my office.

Dual TM drives would make my system better but I can live with the 30 day disaster limit.

...disclaimer...I created a media server via apple TV(s) for my family. It took so much time to create (months) that I decided to take backup very seriously.