You could save hundreds of $/€/£ buying a Mac with a smaller internal SSD. Is that a good economy, or will you come to regret it? Here are the pros and cons.
storage
The bar chart in Storage Settings shows most of your startup volume is full of System Data. What does it mean, and what use is it? Is its measure of used and free space accurate?
Deciding which file system to use for hard disks can be difficult. Here are the advantages and disadvantages explained in detail, for HFS+ and APFS.
Does your NAS need faster storage or a faster network? If you were to improve those, would throttling limit the performance of backups?
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.
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