Mac 911: Cloud backups of Time Machine volumes, How to open enclosing folder items directly from a Spotlight search
Solutions to your most vexing Mac problems.
DON’T USE CLOUD BACKUP SERVICES TO MAKE COPIES OF YOUR TIME MACHINE VOLUMES. HERE’S WHY
Time Machine is a simple and generally effective way to make an ongoing archive of a Mac’s files and folder structure. But it’s only a single copy of your data. The same goes for third-party apps that can clone a drive (make an exact duplicate) or make incremental archives that let you retrieve a snapshot of the current state of a volume or older versions of files that have been modified. These packages include Arq, Carbon Copy Cloner, Chronosync, and Superduper!, as well as many others.
That single, on-site copy is a problem. It’s why I’ve recommended for many years that people also use a cloud-based backup service that has robust encryption.
My current top pick for home use for price, performance, and encryption options is Backblaze, but Carbonite and idrive are also contenders depending on the features you need. Crashplan’s makers, Code42 Software, shut down its personal backup offering, but has an option for small-to-medium-sized businesses that some people transitioned to.
Now you might think that on top of that belt and suspenders (Time Machine or a local copy plus cloud archives), you should back up your Time Machine volume to an online cloud service too.
This would give you the best of both worlds, right? An Apple-native Time Machine volume you could restore via macos’s deep support, and an extra copy of your data. And you’d have three extra copies (albeit across just two locations) of the same data.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t play out in practice. Backblaze ( go.macworld.com/ bkbl) specifically omits any volume that’s marked as a Time Machine backup, while Carbonite discourages it ( go.macworld. com/cbnt) and Code42 explains the drawback ( go.macworld.com/cptm). idrive is rather neutral ( go.macworld.com/idrv) on the matter. Some of this is business model: Backblaze includes unlimited storage as does Crashplan, while Carbonite and idrive have maximum storage amounts and options to purchase more.
The issue with Time Machine and online backup
The primary issue is that Time Machine uses a special kind of alias, called a hard link, to create complete snapshots for each point in time that a backup operation happens. That omits making a fresh copy of any file that remains the same between those backups. These hard links can appear multiple times in a volume, but all refer to a single file.
It’s clever, but it only works within a single volume. If you back up files from that volume using file-based archiving software, hard links are copied each time they appear. (This also makes it difficult to copy a Time Machine backup from one volume to another without bloating the size.)
Code42 tested how quickly Time Machine archives grew with a 53GB volume on a Mac. Over a week, that Mac’s Time Machine backup reached 63GB. However, Crashplan’s archive grew to 303.5GB. If you have caps or throttles on your broadband data upload, Time Machine backups can easily push you over, too, for this reason.
You can wind up with a compounded problem: If your Time Machine volume contains other data besides the Time Machine container, some of the cloud archiving services won’t back up that non-time Machine data! (This column was prompted by a reader who hit that issue
with Backblaze.)
Here’s some strategies on how to enhance and solve these situations:
Segregate your Time Machine backup. Use Disk Utility to add a new partition (HFS+) or volume within a container (APFS) to the drive that contains your Time Machine backup. APFS is easier than HFS+ in this regard, because a new volume in a container shares all available space, giving you flexibility. Once split, move your non-time Machine data to the new volume or partition, and then you can have the cloud service back up that data.
Rotate Time Machine backups off site. I recommend using disk encryption for backup drives (Control-click the drive and choose the Encryption item), because at rest a macos-encrypted volume is extremely secure. That can avoid you worrying about the drive being stolen or examined when you’re not around. macos can automatically back up to multiple
Time Machine destinations if they’re connected at once, but it will also catch up destinations that you plug back in after they’re removed. Put one in safedeposit box—though the New York Times warns that’s not as secure as we thought— or at another location to which you have regular access.
Add a clone to your mix. Time
Machine works best in my experience and opinion as an archive—retrieving older or deleted versions of individual files or the contents of folders—than for restoring a drive. It’s also great for migrating from one Mac to another. With external drives so inexpensive, add one that uses one of the packages mentioned earlier that can clone the contents of your startup drive. These all offer “smart” updates, so that only files that need to be replaced or deleted on the clone are modified each time it runs. I have a nightly clone on my desktop computer, and a weekly one for my laptop.
HOW TO CONVERT A CASESENSITIVE MAC HFS+ PARTITION INTO A CASEINSENSITIVE ONE
Apple has long offered two versions of the same HFS+ partition formatting scheme used to create a filesystem for a Macmountable volume: “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” and “Mac OS Extended (Casesensitive, Journaled)”. With the addition of APFS formatting, that flavor is also available in case sensitive and insensitive versions. What a difference that “casesensitive” makes!
Case-sensitive filesystems can allow multiple files to have the same humanreadable name using different capitalization. Blue dolphin.pdf and blue dolphin.pdf
and blue DOLPHIN.PDF are all considered different items to a casesensitive filesystem. With the opposite, a case-insensitive filesystem, the default option for macos in HFS+ and APFS, those files can’t co-exist: They’re all effectively the same name with a different appearance.
In olden Unix days, case-sensitivity made sense in some contexts, and Apple offered a case-sensitive version of HFS+ for compatibility’s sake for those people who required it.
However, some Mac software—notably that made by Adobe and Valve—balks at case sensitivity. I’ve heard from and read of people who accidentally chose “casesensitive” when setting up a drive, not realizing what they were getting themselves into. They’d like to shift off that into the more standard case-insensitive format. While there was software in the past that could convert a case-sensitive partition to a caseinsensitive one in place without copying the data off, the firm that made that software has shut down. (Coriolis Systems was a long-time Mac developer, and they generously made all their software free on closing ( go. macworld.com/crls). However, the last supported version of macos is 10.13. Because this involves filesystem-level changes, I would not use this software with 10.14 Mojave or later.)
Instead, you have to make a clone,
reformat your partition, and copy the data back. For a startup volume:
1. Clone the drive that has casesensitive formatting to another volume using Disk Utility, Superduper, or Carbon Copy Cloner. (You could use Time Machine, but it’s an inefficient way to restore an entire disk except in a pinch.)
2. Make sure you have a separate, complete backup in case the one created in step 1 fails.
3. Restart your Mac, and then hold down Command-r before the Apple logo appears to bring up macos Recovery.
4. Click Disk Utility in the list of options that appears.
5. Select the internal drive or boot partition in the list at left.
6. Reformat it using a case-insensitive option.
7. Right-click it and select Restore. 8. From the Restore From popup menu, select your clone. If it’s a disk image, click the Image button to find it on a mounted drive.
9. Click Restore and be prepared to wait a long while!
10. When the restoration is complete, exit Disk Utility and select Apple menu → Startup Disk.
11. Select the drive to which you restored your clone, and then click Restart.
If you’re copying an external or nonboot volume, you can omit steps 3 and 4 above and launch Disk Utility from your Mac in the Applications → Utilities folder.
By the way, you have of course noted that OS X and macos have always retained the capitalization you use in names as you type it in or a program names it. That’s because the system is case preserving: It honors capitalization, but any variation in lower- and upper-case is ignored in finding a file or overwriting it.
HOW TO LOAD A MASSIVE AMOUNT OF DATA INTO PHOTOS ON A MAC SET TO OPTIMIZE MAC STORAGE
icloud Photos lets you keep full-resolution versions of your images and videos in icloud storage, while letting you choose to store just optimized versions—thumbnails and low-res video previews—on your iphone, ipad, or Mac. That’s great, especially when you have more media than storage. When you need the full image or video, you can double-click it within Photos to retrieve it for local use.
The conundrum can come when you want to load a massive amount of media data into Photos on a Mac set to Optimize Mac Storage (in Photos → Preferences → icloud) all at once instead of adding to it over time. The trick is to stagger your import. Let’s say you have—as one Macworld reader did—600gb of media data and a 128GB disk drive in your Mac.
After setting Photos to optimized storage, import batches of data and wait for them to upload. You can follow upload progress at the bottom of the Photos window in the Photos view. You may have to bump the scroll a little to hit the very bottom where the library size is shown and the icloud upload status displays.
Once each chunk has uploaded, you should be able to import another tranche. As new media is imported, Photos should automatically delete the local fullresolution copy of your image and video as long as it’s been uploaded to icloud.
The thumbnails and previews take up some space, but it’s typically so much less than the originals that with tens of gigabytes available on your Mac, you should be able to store a 600GB library that contains mostly high-resolution images and videos. You could run into trouble only if you have a massive number of relatively low-resolution photos, but it’s unlikely you would with a collection of images that require that much storage.
Now, I’ve argued previously that icloud Photos shouldn’t be your sole backup ( go. macworld.com/icph). If you only use optimized storage on all your devices, that’s what icloud turns out to be! You may instead want to import photos onto an external drive first, then import from there to Photos, so that you always have a second local copy, even if the organization of the images into albums or folders isn’t the same in both places.
You can also use a technique I described a while back, too, and occasionally do a time-consuming but useful full-resolution download using an external drive ( go.macworld.com/flrs) connected to your Mac.
Apple hasn’t yet fully embraced cloud storage as a “one tool in the arsenal” approach. While it does store data with redundancy, making its own multiple geographically dispersed backups of your data, it still doesn’t provide a simple way to download all your stuff directly from icloud.
HOW TO OPEN ITEMS IN THE ENCLOSING FOLDER DIRECTLY FROM A SPOTLIGHT SEARCH IN MACOS
One might think after many years of Spotlight search being in macos that there would be no new tricks. But a colleague on Twitter asked a reasonable question and many people chimed in with the same query: When viewing a list of results in a Spotlight search in
the Finder, how do you jump to see the item in the context of its enclosing folder rather than just opening the file?
The answer is simple: hold down Command and press the Return key or press Command-r. You can also hold down Command and double-click the item in the results list.
Holding down Command by itself reveals the path to the file or folder without opening the enclosing folder.
You may already know one more: press Command-option-spacebar, and a Finder window opens with the focus on the search field so you can just start typing. ■