I set it up to back up the home directories of our laptops every night on a schedule that should only see one laptop at a time doing a backup.

Unfortunately, though, Time Machine doesn’t really give you any configuration options.Įnter the picture Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC), which offers all the configuration options a geek could ask for, and probably more. A backup that happens at night, when the laptop isn’t in use, would not only be sufficient, but it would also be preferable. And while there are some cases where hourly backups can be useful-an rm -r in the wrong directory for example-neither I nor the rest of the family have found hourly backups important. This is the case even with super-fast Wifi and gigabit local networking. It backs up files once an hour, and over a network this is a slow process, which tends to impact network performance on the laptop.

That said, my experience with Time Machine wasn’t great. Openmediavault, the software running our home NAS, makes this relatively straight-forward, too. Even better, there are different solutions that allow Unix-based servers to act as Time Capsules. The actual hardware products have been discontinued many years ago, but the process is still supported. Time Machine is the built-in backup solution and it is not limited to storing the backups on an external drive. But what if you don’t want to have an external drive hanging off your laptop? Or if you don’t want to store all your files on iCloud? I didn’t want either, so I came up with a different strategy, which involves Carbon Copy Cloner, a NAS, rclone, and Backblaze. Backing up a Mac is a solved problem, right? Just attach an external drive for Time Machine and sync your files to iCloud.

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