Time to move on from bootable backups, whether you like it or not - Riccardo Mori

Riccardo Mori surveyed a 106 participants on their backup practices using Windows and Macs, and includes some takeaways on changes from spinning disk to SSD.

I received 106 replies, 75 from Mac users. Of these Mac users, only 11 are still actively, routinely backing up their data. Of the remaining 64, 21 told me they’ve never backed up anything. In the remaining group of 43 users, a few of them relied solely on Time Machine backups (without even verifying them), but the majority was simply using some cloud service (Dropbox, iCloud, OneDrive, Google Drive) to save selected critical data and nothing else. [...] every person in my sample who was using an Apple Silicon Mac didn’t bother with any particular backup solution, and a lot of them specifically told me that they had stopped bothering with backups since Apple stopped including spinning hard drives in their computers, and especially since transitioning to the Apple Silicon architecture.

Interesting observation of moving to Apple Silicon and SSDs made users feel safer in their data to not bother with backups. I'd have expected most Mac users to use backup with Time Machine given how easy it is to use.

[...] of the 31 Windows users who submitted their replies, the vast majority used OneDrive as main backup solution, while 5 people told me they relied on local NAS solutions to preserve their data. Even among them, SSDs inside their main computers meant a general sense of increased reliability and security.

A similar observation on HDD and SSD with Windows users as well.