How I Handle Backups (Now)

Nothing like waking up to a machine that won't boot and uncertainty as to whether your backups are fresh, right?

Well, that's what happened last Thursday.

Overnight, my Macbook went from working fine to being stuck in a boot loop (hint, hint: M-chip macs have something called a T2 chip that can get "locked" and you can unlock it with the key command I've shared at the end of the post).

Fortunately, the hard drive was uncorrupted and I found a hack to get back to the OS and do a mirror of the hard disk.

In the wake of what could have been a catastrophic meltdown—more on that in a second—I thought it might be helpful to share my new approach to (redundant) backups. You may have something you prefer more, but I've found this new setup gives me peace of mind.

Wait, you didn't have backups?

Not exactly.

For a long time now, my go-to backup solution has been to use Arq, offloading my most important data to Amazon S3. When my laptop started boot looping, I didn't really panic because I knew Arq was running. Or so I thought...

As it turns out, as I was starting the recovery process, I noticed "oh hey, Arq isn't running..." And shortly after that I discovered..."holy crap, Arq hasn't been running since September of last year."

Much to my surprise, my go-to backup tool failed to re-enable its launch at startup option after an update. I didn't catch it because—up until now—Arq has always been running in the background on my machine (easily going on ~10 years of use).

Again, fortunately, the hard drive was uncorrupted so I was still able to get back ups and reinstate Arq. Though, this ended up prompting me to stop and evaluate what a better, more-redundant backup strategy might be so recovery was both quick and stress-free.

Carbon Copy Cloner

Up until the other day, I only knew of this app by name. I hadn't used it before—I think I may have bookmarked it years before—but its sales pitch was what I was after: a complete, perfect mirror of your entire Macintosh HD coupled with the ability to do a quick restore with a few clicks.

Funny enough, about two weeks before this happened, backups were on my mind and I had picked up a fresh 2TB external SSD from Amazon. I didn't plan on using CCC at the time, but after I was reminded of it (and realized I had a fresh SSD laying around), I immediately downloaded a trial.

I did a quick test run on the trial plan, formatting the new SSD I had (I followed their suggestion of using APFS Encrypted), and running a test backup. In ~1 hour, the entire 1TB drive was backed up (easily verified by opening up the backup drive).

After this initial test, I decided to buy a license (just a one time payment). I set up my backups to run as files change on the machine (I was going to do 1 hour backups, but I figured it was worth a shot to get something more granular which ended up working out).

Once I confirmed that this approach was working well (I ended up having to purchase a new backup laptop as my main had to be sent off for repairs), I decided to commit to always having this running. Because it's a little cumbersome to always have an SSD dangling from your laptop (assuming you're not at a desk), I decided to pick up two of these inexpensive hard drive mounts (one for the new laptop and one for the old that's in the shop).

These mount on the back of the monitor/lid and let me keep backups running consistently—even if I'm on the move.

Arq

Despite the initial scare by seeing that Arq wasn't running for months, I still trust the software as it's gotten me out of some serious jams in the past (like when my previous Macbook Pro's battery inflated and I had an active roster of mentorship students I was meeting with daily).

For Arq, because I'm using Amazon S3, I intentionally limit what I back up to just the most essential, valuable work and documents on my machine (ingress to S3 is free, but egress can burn you, so it's smart to prune down to essentials).

The only gotcha about Arq is that, unlike Carbon Copy Cloner, it's not just blind copying your files to S3. Instead, it uses a special format that can only be accessed via the Arq app. Not the end of the world, but mildly frustrating if you just want to get directly to your files.

Moving forward

So that's it: I'm now using a combo of Carbon Copy Cloner straight to an SSD (mounted on my laptop) and the absolute essential stuff going to S3 via Arq.

Between these two, now, I feel fairly confident that when the next disaster strikes, recovery should be far less stressful (and much quicker).

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[1] To "unlock" a T2 chip, shut down your machine entirely and then hold the power button for 1 second, and then add the left ctrl, left option, and right shift keys. Hold all keys for 10 seconds and then, release those three, continuing to hold the power button until you boot into the OS.