> I've been generally happy with Time Machine's stability, but this is getting me a little worried. For the longest time, I backed up my MacBooks with Time Mac

> I've been generally happy with Time Machine's stability, but this is getting me a little worried. For the longest time, I backed up my MacBooks with Time Machine to a NAS. Seemed to work fine - Time Machine was successful and I was able to browse previous versions on the machine being backed up without an issue (browse history of machine A on machine A). Then one day I was planning to wipe a MacBook and do a clean install - figured I'd confirm I could browse my backups made on machine A on machine B before I wiped A. I spent over an hour attempting to open the sparse bundle (w/ Time Machine and manually) and just couldn't do it - kept loading forever or giving me errors about volume verification among other things[0]. > I guess now's a good time to looking into Arq (or similar) Like you, I decided to take a look at alternatives. I'd previously played around with Arq (v5) and it looked awesome - stable, well-documented, etc. Well, by the time I actually needed an alternative to Time Machine, Arq had released v6 - earlier this year[1]. Unfortunately it appeared to be bug-prone (not great for backups!) and lacked ANY documentation (one of the great things about v5 was the in-depth documentation, particularly around backup format). Users on the subreddit[2] weren't thrilled and you can't purchase v5 licenses (and TBH I wouldn't recommend purchasing software that isn't supported anymore). Within the last week or two, Arq has released a second major version within a year - v7[3]. Feedback appears to be better, and the author has acknowledged mistakes, but TBH I'm wary. Definitely not adopting two-week old software as my primary method for backing up. I've been playing around with Carbon Copy Cloner[4] more recently. The ideal goal would be bootable backups to a disk image hosted remotely but that doesn't appear to be possible[5] - so I'm resigning myself to file-based instead - no bootable disk image, but at least I'm a little more confident in my backups? And a single "file" (or image) becoming corrupt doesn't blow away the rest of my backup ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ If anyone has any suggestions or ideas, I'm all ears. Edit: Probably worth noting that in this case machine A was running 10.14 (and HFS) and machine B 10.15 (and APFS) - but I'd imagine 10.15 should be able to open a 10.14 HFS sparse bundle without an issue. [0] https://pastebin.com/Le6Q407e https://pastebin.com/Le6Q407e [1] https://www.arqbackup.com/blog/arq-6-more-power-more-security-more-storage-savings/ https://www.arqbackup.com/blog/arq-6-more-power-more-securit... [2] https://old.reddit.com/r/Arqbackup/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Arqbackup/ [3] https://www.arqbackup.com/blog/next-up-arq-7/ https://www.arqbackup.com/blog/next-up-arq-7/ [4] https://bombich.com/ https://bombich.com/ [5] https://bombich.com/kb/ccc5/i-want-back-up-my-whole-mac-time-capsule-nas-or-other-network-volume https://bombich.com/kb/ccc5/i-want-back-up-my-whole-mac-time...