SNAPSHOTSSnapshots — a feature of APFS — have been available since High Sierra, but there has been no convenient way to use them. But Michael Bombich has added a feature to Carbon Copy Cloner 5.1 that makes it a first class Snapshot manager. So what the H____ is a Snapshot? Snapshots...
- are a feature of APFS
- are enabled by default when a volume is formatted APFS
- are created automatically at "senisble" intervals
Snapshots are read-only copies of your volume. Not only is it impossible to modify the content of those snapshots, but it’s also not possible to delete those snapshots without a special entitlement granted by Apple. What that means is that malware and ransomware can't delete your snapshots. So if you were somehow affected by ransomware and it started encrypting your files, you could remove the ransomware, then restore your files from the snapshot. CCC backups could literally save you thousands of dollars!
- are relatively small -- on my system they average 237.8MB, are taken at roughly hourly intervals and only the last 15 are retained.
- restoration to a previous version — even restoration to a previous OS version — is virtually instantaneous
- are NOT a replacement for either Time Machine, Carbon Copy Cloner, or SuperDuper
- a useful supplement to Time Machine, Carbon Copy Cloner, or SuperDuper
Hopefully Snapshots won't be needed very often, or at all, but they may be very useful if they are. I can envision Snapshots being combined with Time Machine as a seamless backup system.
