Good read, all the way through. Useful stuff, pass it along.
2 thoughts on “How to verify your Mac backups are working properly”
DiskWarrior doesn’t support APFS. That’s a big and getting bigger shortcoming that isn’t mentioned in the article.
SMART Utility is almost two years past due for it’s upgrade, and a year since the last update about it. They’re also on record as saying that NVMe support is “experimental”. Not confidence-inspiring.
In the days of $60-70 2TB drives (in the US at least), keeping an empty drive to use for (non-clone) test restores onto is worth it if you have ANY data you care about. Clones should obviously be booted from periodically.
“The most reliable way to verify your backed up data is in good shape is by simply restoring it.”
Er, well, yes. And if the backup isn’t good and you’ve just erased the source drive…
This is one of the blindspots of backup processes and software for small business or consumers. We don’t have identical machines lying around to test with. Doing a verification by restore means, at BEST, doing a backup and then immediately a restore, taking the machine out of circulation for 1-N hours. And that really only verifies the latest backup. At worst, you get the clusterf*ck I had when restoring back from Mojave and finding that, for the second time in 3 years, Time Machine is junk and the restored drive won’t boot, necessitating a reinstall and restore of just the data.
DiskWarrior doesn’t support APFS. That’s a big and getting bigger shortcoming that isn’t mentioned in the article.
SMART Utility is almost two years past due for it’s upgrade, and a year since the last update about it. They’re also on record as saying that NVMe support is “experimental”. Not confidence-inspiring.
In the days of $60-70 2TB drives (in the US at least), keeping an empty drive to use for (non-clone) test restores onto is worth it if you have ANY data you care about. Clones should obviously be booted from periodically.
“The most reliable way to verify your backed up data is in good shape is by simply restoring it.”
Er, well, yes. And if the backup isn’t good and you’ve just erased the source drive…
This is one of the blindspots of backup processes and software for small business or consumers. We don’t have identical machines lying around to test with. Doing a verification by restore means, at BEST, doing a backup and then immediately a restore, taking the machine out of circulation for 1-N hours. And that really only verifies the latest backup. At worst, you get the clusterf*ck I had when restoring back from Mojave and finding that, for the second time in 3 years, Time Machine is junk and the restored drive won’t boot, necessitating a reinstall and restore of just the data.