@nohillside I'm not totally sure what the difference between Time machine, Arq, and backblaze is?

@nohillside is Time Machine just a backup utility (i.e. tool) where as Arq and Backblaze are both backup tools and cloud storage bundled together?

@MyWrathAcademia TimeMachine is a tool which backups onto an external disk, NAS or similar

Arq and Backblaze are tools which backup against a cloud storage provider

Typical cloud storage providers are Amazon, Google etc., and Backblaze itself which also offers cloud storage.

@nohillside I like your setup. So what happens when it is time to restore a backup when your backup is separated into full disk backups and backups of important data? After you restore the full disk backup using time machine, do you then restore the latest important data using Arq? So does Arq only overwrite important data on the disk when that data already exists in the Arq repository?

@nohillside I see, so TimeMachine can only do local backups, not both local and cloud backups.

@MyWrathAcademia In case of a full restore I first restore the full backup (which typically is a few days old) and then use Arq (or TM) to restore any documents changed since the last full backup has run. This of course overwrites the older version of MY-VERY-IMPORTANT.DOC but that's the goal after all :)

@nohillside That sounds like a plan :) So, do you do a full restore using Time Machine?

@nohillside I think your strategy is efficient as it it means you do not have to run a full system backup every day. Although if you used incremental backups then I don't think you would need to do both a full system backup and a backup of important data, am I correct in thinking this?

@nohillside say your Mac suffers a catastrophic failure (God forbid), and you need to restore your system to the state it was in at your latest full system backup, can you restore directly from a backup located on the cloud, or does the backup have to be on a physical drive in order to be used for restoring your system?

@nohillside I'm thinking of forgoing local backups, and just do one recurring backup to the cloud.

A single backup is no backup at all. With the approach I take (and others do as well), I have backups in different places both onsite and offsite which protects against a range of potential problems. With storage space (for both local and cloud backups) sp cheap nowadays there is no good reason to not backup into several places.

Typical backup software allows you to restore in place (directly from the backup space to the correct location)

@nohillside I see, it's best to have multiple points of failure.

@nohillside Thanks, that's what I wanted to know.

@nohillside I did some reading and cloud providers like BackBlaze delete your data soon after you stop paying for storage so I would end up needing a physical external drive anyway if I ever want to move my data or stop paying a cloud provider to store my data. So I'm now considering alternating between Time Machine and restic as tools for performing local backups to an external hard drive, then use restic and a backend such as B2 cloud storage to store my data offsite.

@MyWrathAcademia any cloud storage will disappear when you don‘t pay your bills :-)