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Fastest way to backup

I have a late 2013 iMac which has Thunderbolt 2 and USB 3.0 ports. I need to replace my external hard drives - Time Machine and bootable clone. What is the best approach that will yield the fastest data transfer - an external SSD tied to a USB 3.0 port? Trying to find adapters to connect a USB C SSD external to the Thunderbolt 2 port (not much luck here)?


I appreciate your input.

iMac Line (2012 and Later)

Posted on Oct 29, 2019 12:49 PM

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Posted on Oct 29, 2019 2:44 PM

Where you will see the difference is if you use the CCC drive to boot from. Trying to chase speed doing a backup really is a fools errand as it doesn't really matter. Where you should look for speed is doing boot times, shutdown times, file and app opening and closing.


However to answer your question, if you have a Thunderbolt equipped SSD that will be the quickest read write you can get. However for doing a backup, a SSD is really kind of waste unless you intend to use it as a boot drive at some point which is the advantage of using a bootable clone.

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Oct 29, 2019 2:44 PM in response to sully3

Where you will see the difference is if you use the CCC drive to boot from. Trying to chase speed doing a backup really is a fools errand as it doesn't really matter. Where you should look for speed is doing boot times, shutdown times, file and app opening and closing.


However to answer your question, if you have a Thunderbolt equipped SSD that will be the quickest read write you can get. However for doing a backup, a SSD is really kind of waste unless you intend to use it as a boot drive at some point which is the advantage of using a bootable clone.

Oct 29, 2019 2:56 PM in response to sully3

Time machine uses the reverse of what you are asking for, but it is brilliant.


It does its backups at LOW priority in the background, so as to not interfere with your important foreground work.


This means that although the many small backups do not complete quickly, nor do they require you to set aside a special time to do backups. They plod along in the background in a way that often means, when you need a recent backup, Time machine is the backup that got done (instead of put off to when there was a block of time) and it there to save you.

Oct 29, 2019 3:12 PM in response to sully3

I would like to add one more: ONE TimeMachine can be risky since you are willing to explore SSD as backup drive that you might be able to afford 2nd HDD for backup.


I did experience ONE failure of 1 TimeMachine hard drive. That been said -- get a second or even third drive for multiple backups to be in the safe side.


In my case, I have one RAID-1 (dual mirror-drives) with USB interface + 1 single USB 3 HDD, as part of TimeMachines.


Oct 29, 2019 5:23 PM in response to rkaufmann87

Agreed - and I should have been more specific that I am looking for speed on that cloned volume for when/if I need to use it as the boot volume. The other volumes can stay on a traditional hard drive. I only want the SSD for the bootable clone.


My issue is everything is on TB 3 which uses the same physical port as USB C. My TB 2 port would need an adapter - which I can't find. I was hoping someone else had the same problem.

Oct 29, 2019 5:33 PM in response to rkaufmann87

Thanks to everyone for all your input. I do use SuperDuper and also have a trial of CCC going as SD doesn't have Catalina out of beta yet. I updated to Catalina but lost all of my TM history during the transition, otherwise it's working okay on my "old" iMac. I've toyed with a clean install of Catalina as I have some Adobe fragments here and there among other things and haven't done a clean install in quite a few releases.

Fastest way to backup

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