Internal or external? Hard disk or SSD? USB or Thunderbolt? Cooled or compact? Branded or separates? An external boot disk? Do you have a return and refund option?
Time Machine
What’s the Update volume doing weeks after the last macOS update? What can I do if ejecting my Time Machine backup storage causes an improper ejection error?
M1 Macs don’t support SMART monitoring over USB-C, forcing us to choose between Full Security without SMART, or Reduced Security with SMART support.
Signs of an SSD going down may be confusing, but when random apps seem to freeze, be suspicious. Diagnosis and recovery are also covered.
Is a NAS system worth considering for your backups? Could one replace your existing Time Capsule? Here’s additional information to help you decide.
Can you get Time Machine to back up faster by turning I/O throttling off? If so, it this something to do only for large backups, or can it be set as the default? Does it also affect other background processes?
iCloud Drive just works. Time Machine just works. So Time Machine should back up the contents of your iCloud Drive? Maybe not.
Have you found Time Machine docs helpful in solving problems? Do you know what “custom access” means in the Permissions section of Get Info?
All disks cache data to be written, which makes benchmarking them tricky. It has more serious consequences which macOS tries to allow for in file systems and backups.
Why Time Machine makes snapshots, and how they can grow and apparently consume free space. What you can and should do to manage this.
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