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What is a snapshot?
Snapshots are a feature of Apple's APFS filesystem that facilitate backup versioning. A snapshot is a point-in-time representation of a volume on a hard drive. Every file on the volume is frozen within a snapshot, perfectly capturing its state at the exact moment that the snapshot was created. Even if you change or delete a file later, the file in its previous state remains available within the snapshot. CCC backups are built around APFS snapshot functionality, allowing you to restore older versions of your files and files that you've accidentally deleted.
Note: Snapshots are only available for APFS-formatted volumes.
The Role of Snapshots in a Comprehensive Data Protection Strategy
There are several aspects of data protection that a backup aims to provide. Protection against:
- Accidental file deletion or modification
- Malicious file modification (e.g. malware/ransomware)
- Hard drive failure
- Computer theft
- Catastrophic loss (e.g. tornado, hurricane, flood -- loss of both original and backups)
Support for snapshots at the filesystem level is an important and integral component of a backup strategy, but snapshots are not a complete replacement for a true backup on physically separate hardware. If your startup disk fails, snapshots on that disk aren't going to help you restore your startup disk and data. Having a backup on an external disk gives you protection against hardware failure.
|
Snapshots
|
External Backup
|
Backup to Remote Macintosh
|
|
|---|---|---|---|
| Accidental file deletion | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Malware/ransomware | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Hard drive failure |
|
✔️ | ✔️ |
| Theft |
|
✔️ | ✔️ |
| Catastrophic loss |
|
|
✔️ |
When you develop your backup strategy, consider all of the possible risks to your data and decide whether and how you will mitigate those risks. At minimum, we recommend regularly scheduled backups to a locally-attached hard drive. With a regularly scheduled backup, you will have very good protection against the most common risks to your data.
Using snapshots in CCC
CCC considers snapshot support on an individual volume basis. When you select a destination volume for your backup task, CCC's Backup Volume Setup Assistant will encourage you to use the APFS format and provide an option to enable snapshot support. For basic snapshot support, you don't need to configure any settings; CCC will automatically manage your snapshots using a sensible set of defaults.
To view or change a volume's snapshot support or retention policy, reveal CCC's sidebar, then click on the volume in CCC's sidebar. CCC will list any snapshots currently present on the volume and will display the retention policy for that volume. Remember that snapshot support is limited to APFS volumes. If you select a non-APFS formatted volume in CCC's sidebar, you won't see any snapshot settings.