New drive for SuperDuper - No APFS option

[ashleykaryl]

I see where I was going wrong now. When you open it defaults to Master Boot Record as the scheme and that doesn't allow APFS as an option.

I assume you suggest using an SSD for SD because it could then serve as a fast start up drive, rather than USB 3.

[dnanian]

Fast startup and fast backup, plug it works better with APFS. I mean an external SSD - which would still be USB3/USBC...

[ashleykaryl]

Yes that all makes good sense. I guess I was just just trying to keep the costs down after all the other expenses without thinking it through enough. I imagine the SSD would likely be more reliable as well.

[dnanian]

Yes, I think it likely would, and their prices are down low enough that it makes sense for "reasonable" sizes.

[ashleykaryl]

My main drive is only 512gigs and one of the reasons I bought the 1TB SSD was to store data that doesn't necessarily need to be on the startup drive, therefore I could probably get away with a smaller 512 SSD as well for SuperDuper.

I'll check out what is available on Amazon. I went for a Samsung T5 previously, which isn't thunderbolt, but it is USB 3.1 2nd generation, so that is reasonably fast.

In addition to all of this I'll also use BackBlaze, having learned that you can never have enough backups wen things go wrong. I have an app installed called Smart Reporter that should tell me in theory if a drive is about to fail but I don't think it is much use on external drives.

[dnanian]

I've been pretty happy with the WD MyPassport SSDs. I wouldn't let the size get too tight - never hurts to have too much, and as I said, the price isn't high.

[ashleykaryl]

I was just looking at the WD on Amazon and somebody asked about using it as a bootable drive on a Mac. WD responded rather strangely:

"This SSD Model is not suitable to use as a bootable drive. It is not recommended and it voids the warranty of the drive."

It looks good and I have no doubt you would have tested this, so I don't know why they would say that. Sometimes the answers provided by customer support at large companies can be truly mystifying.