Alternative to Time Machine?

[bazookaman]

All this time, I've been running out of space VERY quickly on my stupid TM backup. I've checked and rechecked that I am NOT backing up an external drive that houses my Parallels virtual disk. And every time, despite my remembering I did exclude it, there it is. EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. So I thought it was my fault, and not remembering to exclude it.

No wonder my backup fills up so fast, it's backing up a 500gb file every time. But that's not the best part. And this is SO STUPID.

I went to TM after the most recent out of space error. Clicked options. Sure enough. There's my external. The same external I've excluded I don't know how many times. Here's the trick. TM DOES NOT REMEMBER. What the actual FUCK Apple??? My parallels drive is disconnected at the end of every day and reconnected in the AM. Mother fucking TM has been adding that drive back every day! It doesn't remember I've excluded it. Which makes zero sense. If I want to exclude an fucking external drive, I don't want to INCLUDE it the next day. How stupid.

[space-time]

CCC or SD

[anonymouse1]

If you're buying something, buy CCC.

[sekker]

Apple is paying no attention to Time Machine.

You can set CCC to do regular backups.

Alternatively, keep files in a cloud account.

[bazookaman]

I already use CCC to clone my drive. Can CCC do versioning? Thats what I want. I want something to mimic TM so that I can go back to a version I did a few weeks ago if needed.

[Zoidberg]

Articles @ Bombich.com:

Protecting data that is already on your destination volume: The CCC SafetyNet

Leveraging Snapshots on APFS Volumes

[Fritz]

CCC here too. I gave up on TM a few years back.

[jdc]

CCC does it, but you wont like how it works. I use the TM restore function at least once every couple of months, so yeah, its handy.

I moved to CCC and its snapshots/safetynet awile back-- I suppose it works fine, but navigating them or it was confusing as all get out to me.

I kept my CCC backups, but after a few months of using it, just broke down and added another drive to my chain and made it a TM backup. So might have have triple redundant hard backups now, but meh.

I never disconnect drives, so cant address your specific situation... Perhaps TM helper software would give you more functionality?

[hal]

there is no perfect replacement for TM - there is nothing that does the spacy look back into time thing, but if you want a back up that can pull and recover past states, I'd go with CCC, but it requires some learning - especially if you want to to use like TM - you'll need to master it. TM is braindead simple to use. You might consider completely wiping your backup and redoing it from scratch so that it works properly.

[bazookaman]

I'm running CCC right now. We'll see. I'm not married to the TM UI. It's fancy shmancy I guess but I'd prefer it actually work the way it should. Unfortunately, I have an external that is mounted and unmounted daily, and there is just no way I will remember to go into TM options and exclude that drive, every single day. And I shouldn't have to. But apparently I do according to Apple.