Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

ThinMachine – A $25 thin client macOS Time Machine appliance

tomverbeure.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 189 posts

Re: ThinMachine – A $25 thin client macOS Time Machine appliance

#11

Post by tverbeure »

housemusicfan wrote: post #7
beering wrote: post #2

Is netatalk the key thing here that makes it Time Machine compatible? The rest seems like standard DIY home server stuff.

Yeah this is as pointless as every "life hack" on YouTube. Haven't you been able to Time Machine backup to any HFS-formatted sparse bundle since forever? Located on literally ANY samba server - Windows, Linux, or ye olde NAS. I have personally done this for years. I don't get the novelty here unless you're into the "I built a submarine with parts I got off eBay" angle.

I write these blog posts for primarily for myself, and hopefully because somebody might find them useful. I claim no novelty, there are no ads, no traffic tracking, there is no intention whatsoever to make money from it.

But if my posts irritate some jerk on the Internet who has nothing better to do than spread negativity, then that’s definitely a nice unintended benefit.

Do you need a hug?

Re: ThinMachine – A $25 thin client macOS Time Machine appliance

#12

Post by climb_stealth »

My advice to retain your sanity: stop using Time Machine and use Carbon Copy Cloner [0] instead. It works. It keeps working. It has excellent documentation for any possible backup and restore cases. It is transparent about what it is doing.

Time Machine works fine until it doesn't. And it won't tell you that a backup is broken until you try to restore from it. The errors are going to be cryptic. There is going to be no support and the forums are not going to help. The broken backup is not going to be able to be repaired. Time Machine uses the "fuck you user" approach of not providing any information about what it does, or doesn't, or intends to do or whatever.

If your data is worth backing up, don't use Time Machine.

[0] https://bombich.com

Re: ThinMachine – A $25 thin client macOS Time Machine appliance

#14

Post by Forgeties79 »

housemusicfan wrote: post #7
beering wrote: post #2

Is netatalk the key thing here that makes it Time Machine compatible? The rest seems like standard DIY home server stuff.

Yeah this is as pointless as every "life hack" on YouTube. Haven't you been able to Time Machine backup to any HFS-formatted sparse bundle since forever? Located on literally ANY samba server - Windows, Linux, or ye olde NAS. I have personally done this for years. I don't get the novelty here unless you're into the "I built a submarine with parts I got off eBay" angle.

We see projects like this almost daily on HN. Sometimes people just like to tinker and share, so yeah, the “I built a submarine with parts I got off eBay” type work can be fun and even useful. You never know who you might help!

If that irritates you, this might not be the site for you.

Re: ThinMachine – A $25 thin client macOS Time Machine appliance

#15

Post by firecall »

climb_stealth wrote: post #12

My advice to retain your sanity: stop using Time Machine and use Carbon Copy Cloner [0] instead. It works. It keeps working. It has excellent documentation for any possible backup and restore cases. It is transparent about what it is doing. Time Machine works fine until it doesn't. And it won't tell you that a backup is broken until you try to restore from it. The errors are going to be cryptic. There is going to be…

My advice is to use TimeMachine plus other backups.

I use:

1. TimeMachine on a 20TB TrueNAS ZFS setup

2. BackBlaze

3. ...not a versioned backup, but iCloud Synching, which is a useful disaster recovery.

Re: ThinMachine – A $25 thin client macOS Time Machine appliance

#16

Post by kmeisthax »

pridkett wrote: post #10
mberning wrote: post #6

Synology has nice support for time machine backups. Very easy to set up in DSM.

A superpower of doing Time Machine backups to a Synology is that you can put it on a BTRFS drive with automatic snapshotting. About once a year something seems to happen that causes Time Machine to give a “whoopsie, gotta start over from the beginning again!” sort of error. I’ve found that going back a day or two with snapshots on BTRFS fixes the problem.

For me it was more like every day. I gave up on Time Machine very quickly.

The underlying problem is that Time Machine stores a disk image over the network[0]. If the disk image is not unmounted cleanly, Time Machine treats it as horribly corrupted and refuses to touch it. And this happens very often if you're using a laptop that will be unexpectedly disconnected from its storage constantly.

[0] This is to support things like hardlinks, etc. Ironically this is to emulate what BTRFS snapshots do natively. No clue if modern Time Machine uses APFS, but so long as they shove the actual data inside of a disk image this problem will continue occurring.

Re: ThinMachine – A $25 thin client macOS Time Machine appliance

#17

Post by climb_stealth »

murphyslaw wrote: post #9
mberning wrote: post #6

Synology has nice support for time machine backups. Very easy to set up in DSM.

Yh, and even they can't get it right. You lose connectivity once in a while and the only way to recover is to erase the backup and start over. I came here to see if someone had built a macos native time machine, but this looks like just another hack.

Just posted this in another comment as well. Ditch Time Machine altogether. Use Carbon Copy Cloner instead. It backs up straight to a network drive. Been using it with my Synology for years. Using Time Machine is playing russian roulette with backup data.

Re: ThinMachine – A $25 thin client macOS Time Machine appliance

#18

Post by [deleted] »

firecall wrote: post #15
climb_stealth wrote: post #12

My advice to retain your sanity: stop using Time Machine and use Carbon Copy Cloner [0] instead. It works. It keeps working. It has excellent documentation for any possible backup and restore cases. It is transparent about what it is doing. Time Machine works fine until it doesn't. And it won't tell you that a backup is broken until you try to restore from it. The errors are going to be cryptic. There is going to be…

My advice is to use TimeMachine plus other backups. I use: 1. TimeMachine on a 20TB TrueNAS ZFS setup 2. BackBlaze 3. ...not a versioned backup, but iCloud Synching, which is a useful disaster recovery.

[deleted]

Re: ThinMachine – A $25 thin client macOS Time Machine appliance

#19

Post by satysin »

scorxn wrote: post #8

I have a Raspberry Pi running Pi-hole and Time Machine, making that little board probably the best value piece of tech I've ever owned. https://saschaeggi.medium.com/use-a-raspberry-pi-4-for-time-... is what I followed.

I use a Synology now but I used a Pi for a couple of years before that without issue.

I did give it to my daughter to use at university but I very much doubt she actually used it and I've not thought about asking until this post :^)

Post reply on HN