Backup Strategy Advice

Honestly, I don't feel the Mac side of Acronis is enticing enough to move away from Time Machine for LOCAL backups.  It's not very robust in features.  The Windows side is pretty awesome, but the Mac side still needs catching up (in my opinion).  Time Machine has a much wider recovery option subset and less restrictions on how much can be backed up and retained (Acronis for Mac is currently 20 backups OR 6 months - so if you're taking daily backups - 20 days!!!)

The area that Acronis could benefit you is the nature of cloud backups.  It can backup an entire machine to the Cloud and can do this for Mac and Windows.  You could pull files from those backups out of the backups and/or do a full system recovery.  

But, alas, Cloud can be slow. And that's where it can be a failure.  As an example, I can backup (or recover) my 600GB of family photos and videos to another internal disk in my PC in a couple of hours.  To an external USB 3.0 drive in a few hours, and to my network NAS in less than 12 hours.  Now, I recently starting pushing this data to the Acronis Cloud backup and the estimation was 12 days (I get 100Mpbs download and 10 upload from my ISP, but usually see only 4-5Mbps upload to the Acronis Cloud).  That was 12 days of continuous backup - which I can't do since my other Acronis backups also need to run so I have to pause this at times (mostly letting it run overnight).  That said, it's been 14 days and nearly 400GB uploaded to the cloud and still showing an estimation of several days to complete the first full backup.  The point is, it can not only tedious to get it into the Cloud, but getting it back from the Cloud can be just as slow - especially if you have a lot of data to recover.  It's nice to have the offsite peace of mind, but the recovery time is crazy).  It is there for my last resort and not something I plan to use unless my house and all of my local, usb and NAS backups go up in flames at the same time.

So, for me, local is my go to - strictly on time and availability of backup and recovery.  Invest in a secondary time capsule or storage device if need be (a NAS could be a great option).  Then duplicate what you're doing already by setting up your Mac Time Machine to point to both locations.  The Windows system, you could backup with Acronis, or Windows backup or even a free tool (I personally like Acronis for backup, but I use a couple others for redundancy).  What I like about NAS devices, is many can be used directly with Time Machine, but also with other backup products like Acronis, or replication software that could sync file/folders between locations.

Thank you for your response. Using your analysis - go local as much as possible with disaster cloud coverage.

I too like Time Machine for my Mac for file version recovery. Not sure File history on Win 10 Laptop provides same functionality. How does Acronis versus Zinstall compare for a Time Machine Win 10 capability.

I am starting to think that one needs 3 types of coverage.

1. Local Time Machine definitely.

2. Local system recovery. I use sudoer for the Mac laptop sometimes but nothing for the Mac desktop or Win 10 Laptop. So, I need 3 clones ready to restore at a moments notice. They do not need to be real current, so long as the other Local Recovery can make up the difference. My problem is I get lazy and don't run sudoer on an external hard drive often enough.

So what is the hardware/software approach to provide local clones?

3. Cloud coverage for protection from a catastrophic disaster where the local systems are all lost. BackBlaze or Acronis type of protection (ignoring the Dropbox cloud coverage types).

Then I need:

Win 10 Time Machine functionality.

Mac/Win local clone protection.

Mac/Win offsite cloud full backups.

I guess I need to research NAS devices. 

What provides the Mac/Win system clone protection in this approach?

Mike

Windows File history is "ok". Not robust, but it works. Having it enabled with an additional backup just beefs up your recovery options and doesn't hurt. Actually, window has "restore previous versions" if you have 'system protection" enabled and reserve some space on disk for it. This can be a really fast way to recover an older version of files or folders. Enabled, with a solid backup plan, and that is probably all you need.

I've never used zinstall so can't speak for it. For Windows, Acronis can configure hourly incrementals for local backups or even what is called Non stop backup (NSB). NSB is only for files/folders (not partitions or disks), but you ar limited to only one such task. Alternatively, you could take hourly incrementals if you need to backup changes so often. And you can build different backup jobs for different data... Like a single job to backup the entire OS daily in the evening, but another job to backup a critical folder hourly. Then you can set retention and cleanup in those tasks so you can manage space in an automated fashion.

If you want full disk clones, Acronis or time machine can do this for a MAC. Did you know you can restore a complete time machine image from the recovery environment? This is more of a restore from backup though.

Acronis has a clone feature in Mac and Windows versions. I have not used it with a Mac, but have used it in Windows (recently a few times too as I migrated to newer PCIe NVMe drives).

https://www.acronis.com/en-us/support/documentation/ATIMAC2019/#41693.html

https://www.acronis.com/en-us/support/documentation/ATI2019/#30481.html

Just make sure you have good full disk backups before cloning - just in case. Backups are always your fallback in case anything goes bad.

As for a NAS, I have a very basic and consumer friendly WD My Cloud 4Tb. It's really no frills, but it is taking time machine backups and Acronis backups and I also synch some data folders to it manually with robocopy .bat files in Windows. You can certainly find more expensive and better NAS devices, but for price and basics functionality, this one is working well for me.

I hadn't really looked at File History, but I think you are right, it seems adequate. I have a bad tendency in my aging years to delete, rename, modify over the original document. As of late I really am trying to do more Save As and do my own version control via date stamps.

I think that with Time Machine, File History, Save As, and Dropbox pretty well gives me reasonable version/backup functionality.

I had forgotten about the Time Machine mac recovery capability. Good thing I guess, since I have had no failures.

Does this sound reasonable? Please adjust if not.

0. Continue to run Time Machine & File History as configured.

1. Install 2 bay NAS.

2. Install True Image on all devices.

3. Create disk image from all devices to NAS.

4. Create recovery bootable DVDs using Acronis for all devices. (Any problem with getting the boot DVD to detect the NAS disk image)?

5. Do Full Backups from all devices to NAS. This is redundant with regard to Time Machine and somewhat with File History. But, why not?

6. What do I put on the Acronis cloud? Can I just setup a NAS backup to the Acronis cloud?

I most likely would only do clones if the need for migration to a new machine occurs. But maybe I should create clone image as well?

Thank you very much for your help. Your comments were exactly what I needed.

That sounds solid to me. I think you're pretty covered already too. But adding a NAS and Acronis backups would certainly add more protection and recovery options so if money isn't an issue and data backup is a priority - yeah, sounds like a good idea to me.

You should be able to connect to your NAS with rescue media just fine.

You could also create full disk images in windows and MacOS with an automated scheme if you wanted instead of offline but offline is fine too. Definitely get familiar with the rescue media and make sure it can see your source and destination drives before a critical situation occurs.

 I usually only clone when needed. Doesn't hurt to have one if it's relatively current, but that's the issue with clones if they're used as backups - they get out of date fairly quickly. Personally, I always rely on backup and recovery as my go to, especially before any major changes (to include before a clone attempt or restore is being planned.) I did clone twice recently went I migrated from an older 970 Pro PCIE NVME to a larger Adata SX PRO (which was an unimpressive drive) and then again over to a 970 Evo Plus. But I took my backups first as a precaution too.