Methods for copying Time Machine backups offsite

I presently use an external USB drive to back up my Mac Mini with Time Machine which is a little about 1.5 TB total, however, I would really like to be able to trickle those backups onto some other cloud provider or even another location on a desktop located at a different office so I am protected from a massive catastrophe. I realize that upstream bandwidth is a major factor in successfully doing this. (I only have 10 megabit upstream.) I have tried to use ARQ which uses S3 backup, and while it works very well, the costs associated could end up being astronomical which I consider backup up my music, movies, etc..., not to mention the the loads of incidental file changes that I I don't need to capture every time. Also, there is simply no way it could ever catch up with with the amount of TM data that gets churned.

What I am looking for is a solution geared specifically for copying Time Machine backups to a cloud location, and does some things to reduce the amount of data that has to be pushed over the pipe. I would be accept having the Time Machine backups that are pushed offsite be far less frequent and I would accept some lag in getting these backups shipped, but I want to have SOMETHING in case I have a catastrophic incident, like a fire or water is spilled on my computer and Time Machine drive simultaneously.

Solutions like Mozy and Carbonite are simply not well geared for MacOS with its heavy reliance on datastores vs files. Attempting to rebuild an iTunes library from files would be a nightmare.

I am having trouble finding anything out there geared for this, but if you have some suggestions, I am all ears.

If I understand your question correctly (and I may not) you would prefer a cloud solution but would be willing to consider another non-cloud offsite solution.

My preference is not to use the cloud for this type of backup. The cloud is fine for low volume data storage and file services (e.g. Dropbox, iCloud, Google Drive, MS OneDrive, etc), but for this type of backup it's not (at least not yet).

Instead, my recommendation is to do something similar to what I am doing. By way of example, I'll explain how I do this for my iMac (but I follow a similar process for all my machines!)

• This iMac has a 500GB HDD
• I have purchased two portable USB 2TB external hard drives
• I have labelled these hard drives as iMac TM Backup HD 1 and iMac TM Backup HD 2
• I set both of these external drives to be TM backup drives
• As both drives are set up with TM they are alternated whenever both drives are available
• Once the initial backups are done, I physically remove one of the external drives and take it 'offsite'
• On the same day each week, I then swap them over
• The net result is that both hard drives will have backups in the order of one week on, one week off (but between them I have a full set of backups).

Now, in terms of keeping one of them offsite, you have a number of options. Over the years I have used as my offsite location any of the following:

• My workplace
• A shed in the back yard
• My car (but this may depend on your climate and where you 'garage' your car)
• A family member's/friend's place (assuming you trust them!)

Basically, the idea is that your offsite drive is somewhere that protects your data in the event your house burns down or you get robbed. My strong suggestion would be in a locked drawer at your workplace (unless you work at home). Most people's workplaces are air-conditioned, secure, and convenient.

IMPORTANT NOTES ABOUT STORAGE

Regardless of the 'offsite' location you choose to keep your hard drive, there are some key factors to keep in mind:

• Always keep the drive safe from large magnetic fields!
• Ensure the location has a temperature range between 10 degrees celsius (50 degrees fahrenheit) and 43 degrees celsius (110 degrees fahrenheit). So, keeping it in a car would usually not be a good idea.

I would like to report that I ended up with a better than 3-2-1 solution that was very different from what I sought out to do in the fist pass. If you are interested in how I did it, please read on.

First off, the attempts to upload Time Machine backups to a cloud data store was a bit of a catastrophe and frankly a bad idea from the start. I just couldn't efficiently upload the sparse bundles for some reason. Plus, I realized that with a 4 TB TM drive performing a restore would have been a nightmare. I was using Arq as my backup client which is normally blazingly fast with its multi-threading and over-the-wire compression. For whatever reason, it took Arq a very long time to scan the Time Machine backup data so upload speeds were always abysmal. I chalk this up to the nature of the TM data store and not Arq, which I can say after a thorough testing is otherwise rock solid, secure, extensively featured, has flexible overhead, and at top speed will probably smoke any other all-in-one provider. The big plus with Arq is that it supports so many cloud data stores so that regardless of the size of your data set, speed requirements, and data integrity needs, you can pick the right provider for you rather than get locked into a single vendor. Plus, it also supports SFTP so you can backup data locally or to a non-native cloud store like Backblaze B2 if you really wanted to.

Because I ended up choosing to have duplicated Time Machine backup drives (which I will swap out every week so one is offsite almost all of the time) and because I have several TB of data, I ended up choosing Amazon Cloud which is about $60/year for unlimited files. With my 30 Mb uplink I can saturate it and then some thanks to Arq's compression. I would probably only need to restore from it if there was an earthquake that knocked out both of my Time Machine backups, or to "top" off files if I had to backup from the offsited TM drive. Also, if there are concerns about data integrity over time, Arq has the feature to vigilantly validate the backups to make sure there is no data rot. If something fails a checksum it's dumped and uploaded again. If it is not available, you are told exactly what was lost. I now have my bases covered. I don't really need backups to the beginning of time but, saving corruption (I don't know how well things "keep" on Amazon Cloud) I will have what I need, which is up to a month's worth of history.

So, in the end I chose backing up my system directly rather than attempting the backup of a backup, which I realize now would have been fraught with peril anyway. Arq's clever techniques of avoiding the backup of unnecessary files seems to put it on par with what Backblaze does. When you restore, you still have to reinstall your apps, but all of your Library data (minus temp files) will be intact. I am backing up 2 hosts separately along with 2 TB of media. It is tearing through the first backup right now at around 3-4 MB/s and at this rate I'll be done by early next week. Cost-wise (and since I already owned Arq) this makes the most sense for me.

In conclusion, this approach ended up being the most convenient and cost effective way to provide 3-2-1 level backups of my data. Also, with much of my data on iCloud or DropBox it's actually more than that. I love the convenience of Time Machine, especially when it comes to restores. It's a one and done solution that will fully restore my system to what it was if I have to replace my Mac. The swapping of drives is a bit manual, but it's only once a week and I have a nice drive case for transport. If I have a fire or theft and am forced to restore from the slightly older offsite drive, I know I have the cloud backup to get my system up to current where necessary. Still, the cloud is mainly for peace of mind in case things really go sideways. I hopefully will never need it, but if I ever do, I will be glad I spent the small amount for it. I hope that documenting this entire exercise will be helpful to others.