Why I Don’t Rely on Time Machine
joeontech.net
Why I Don’t Rely on Time Machine
1–10 of 43 posts
Re: Why I Don’t Rely on Time Machine
#2I agree with the author. I use Time Machine but don't rely on it.
I also had a disk with errors that OSX could not fix. I ended up having to reformat the drive using a Linux laptop. I have had two USB external drives totally die in ten years so I rotate between three drives.
I have cheap cloud storage via OneDrive so I sometimes create dated encrypted ZIP files and push them to OneDrive - additional backup safety. I do the same with Google Drive.
Re: Why I Don’t Rely on Time Machine
#3This is a good time to remind people about proper backups: the 3-2-1 rule.
3 backups. 2 backups (or more) should be on different mediums. 1 (at least) should be offsite (ie. home copy at work or in the cloud)
You need three backups. If we assume that every copy has a chance small but real chance of failure, the chance of all failing at once becomes exponentially less with each copy.
You need at least two different systems (media) for backup to reduce the possibly that one of them appears to be backing things up, but is in fact corrupted. So, two of some system, like Time Machine, Carbonite, Backblaze, Arq, rsync, etc. Ideally, you need to be able to verify your backups. Backups that stores things as files means you can periodically try pulling down some files to make sure they're good. Cloud backups should be in the mix, but consider them last resort for restoration as they are usually pretty difficult to verify everything is good.
You need one offsite to prevent your house burns down and takes your machines and local backups. You can do this with physical media rotation (ie. have two machine backups swapping places with home and work) or have a backup to the cloud.
Re: Why I Don’t Rely on Time Machine
#4This is a good time to remind people about proper backups: the 3-2-1 rule. 3 backups. 2 backups (or more) should be on different mediums. 1 (at least) should be offsite (ie. home copy at work or in the cloud) You need three backups. If we assume that every copy has a chance small but real chance of failure, the chance of all failing at once becomes exponentially less with each copy. You need at least two different sy…
There is this joke that you need three, in case your second one is damaged,
because the first one will be damaged for sure.
I heard it in form about lighters in survival.
Re: Why I Don’t Rely on Time Machine
#5I use Time Machine for general system backups, but I also push a few select things like ~/Documents and ~/Pictures offsite with Tarsnap. I want to find a way to integrate Syncthing into my workflow too.
Re: Why I Don’t Rely on Time Machine
#6I agree with the author. I use Time Machine but don't rely on it. I also had a disk with errors that OSX could not fix. I ended up having to reformat the drive using a Linux laptop. I have had two USB external drives totally die in ten years so I rotate between three drives. I have cheap cloud storage via OneDrive so I sometimes create dated encrypted ZIP files and push them to OneDrive - additional backup safety. I…
I've had issues on (10.10 and 10.11) where FileVault 2 (FDE) irrevocably corrupts some metadata and it cannot be fixed by Disk Utility. (It "works", but performance is terrible and free space is wrong.) Reinstalling by rsyncing latest backup to recreating volumes fixes it.
Also, the usual popular, secure rsync-like service: tarsnap ( https://www.tarsnap.com/ )
brew install tarsnap
https://github.com/BTBurke/tarsnap-backup-osx
Generally: Probably want to validate exclusion of big files for remote backups like VMs, caches, tmp dirs, swap/hibernate files to cut costs, unless they're important / service (&& internet) is cheap (BackBlaze).
Re: Why I Don’t Rely on Time Machine
#7I've had the same experience, TM backups were suddenly broken several times.
Re: Why I Don’t Rely on Time Machine
#8Never used TimeMachine.
I use SuperDuper to simply image my entire box to a disk every so often.
Re: Why I Don’t Rely on Time Machine
#9Well, I agree with the author but not with the way he presents it;
I think the message should be something like "for important data don't rely on a single backup mechanism".
This has nothing to do with Time Machine specifically, any (backup)software can fail at some point...
Re: Why I Don’t Rely on Time Machine
#10I'm convinced that time machine over a network is a bad idea. Seems convenient, but if there's network flakiness, TM will decide that the backup is bad and force you to create a new one. And the first step in that process is to delete the existing backup.
I had that happen once, when the drive I was backing up was in the process of failing. It got about 5gb into the new backup before it was totally dead. Even a somewhat flakey full backup is better than 5Gb of a 2Tb drive.