Does your NAS need faster storage or a faster network? If you were to improve those, would throttling limit the performance of backups?
storage
Backups are for recovery, while archives are for posterity. Plan for the future now by storing important files on durable media in your personal archives.
How much faster should a Thunderbolt 3 SSD be for making Time Machine backups? How can you speed up backups to your NAS? Here are representative speeds from real testing.
How large should the drive be to store all your backups for the next couple of years? Here’s how to work that out for Time Machine and other apps.
From late 2012 until 2021, Apple sold many iMacs and Mac minis with Fusion Drives. Did they really offer the best of both worlds, and why have they gone now?
How does copy on write work, and how do clones grow apart? What effect do they have on the use of space and performance?
There’s a big difference between the storage that’s available, and what’s advisable. Whether it’s affordable is another question.
Overall summary of a year’s testing external hard disks and SSDs ranging in cost from $50 to more than $200 per TB. Which is best?
A simple worked example showing the effect of snapshots and changes in hidden system files in consuming free space on APFS.
Archiving is very different from backing up, from the storage media used to integrity checks. Here are pointers to help you preserve important documents.
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