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ThinMachine – A $25 thin client macOS Time Machine appliance

tomverbeure.github.io

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

#31

Post by 908B64B197 »

Brajeshwar wrote: post #23
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…

I use Carbon Copy Cloner to have a replica of my drive. However, I still use Time Machine as a convenience to go back in time for my mistakes. My daughter thinks I'm one of those nerds that married a regular girl from college and can do magic with software because I can make her computer go back in time and bring back versions of her files.

> My daughter thinks I'm one of those nerds that married a regular girl from college and can do magic with software because I can make her computer go back in time and bring back versions of her files.

Wait until she discovers git!

As an aside, I wish there was an alternative like Time Machine on Windows.

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

#32

Post by mustache_kimono »

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.

> 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.

This is true. Though I've had very good luck re: ZFS and my current Samba config.

If you're not already, you should be snapshotting before and after each network mount. See: https://kimono-koans.github.io/opinionated-guide/#on-network...

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

#33

Post by solarkraft »

Thin clients are great, I got a Fujitsu Futro.

Bohdi Linux: Interesting choice.

Personally I've tried to set up Samba as a Time Machine backend twice and with both setups the initial backup would just completely lock up after a while. I might try again with Netatalk, but thought AFP was deprecated.

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

#34

Post by hoorible »

wlesieutre wrote: post #28
Brajeshwar wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found that the ideal size of Timemachine drive is just about twice of the target drive. It last for months if not years -- enough to go back. Beyond that, there must be an archival/backup system in place if you still want to get back files deleted years ago.

In my experience there's no need to worry about long term disk usage of Time Machine. The backup is going to get in a bad state and start failing to add new backups, requiring you to wipe it and start over before the drive fills up.

My anecdata is the opposite of yours. My backup history is over 15 years old!

I started backing up using Time Machine when I got my first Mac in 2006. Migrated my sparsebundle from my first Time Capsule to another when I needed a bigger one, then migrated that to a number of other drives drives over the years (which thankfully never failed, but I replaced them every 4 years). Have successfully restored from a backup onto at least ten different laptops (I was upgrading every year for a while). I have literally only ever had “one” Time Machine backup in the entire time that I have had a Mac. Honestly, I’m blown away it still works.

I maintain other backups too, I’m not crazy to think that this is rock solid, but at this point I’m keeping it going just to see how long it will last.

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

#35

Post by climb_stealth »

smcleod wrote: post #29
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…

CCC costs $77.50 AUD per major version just to use the app - it might be OK but that's a lot of money! TimeMachine is free and "good enough" for local / local network backups for most people, for remote backup BorgBase (although the "Vorta" borg GUI app is dreadful) and Backblaze are affordable-ish options. Also it doesn't look like CCC has write-only backups (immutable from the client side once created) like Borg ha…

Yes, it is pricey. But you get what you pay for. The attention to detail in the documentation and patch release notes from Bombich is on point.

Zero regrets from my end about the money spent for it and it is one of the few software products where the price tag seems justified.

FWIW I first bought a license in 05/2019. The only major version update since then has been in 07/2021. And the license for the upgrade cost $30.47 AUD. They don't seem to be exploiting version updates as a form of revenue generation.

And yes, I'm sure there are backup solutions that work better in different scenarios. My main point is that Time Machine is rubbish for full system backups. CCC is polished, powerful, robust and power user friendly and one option that I have been super happy with.

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

#36

Post by housemusicfan »

rodgerd wrote: post #26
tverbeure wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> 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. Amen.

> Amen.

Inability to process criticism is how this industry gave us things like the Juicero.

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

#37

Post by mustache_kimono »

st3fan wrote: post #25

I’m not sure if AFP (via Netatalk) is really the right thing to use. I’m pretty sure that “native” Time Machine now prefera CIFS (Samba) over the network.

> I’m not sure if AFP (via Netatalk) is really the right thing to use.

For years, Netatalk was still the more dependable solution, despite the deprecation warnings. I've had very good luck re: my current set up (ZFS and Samba 4.15.13 on Ubuntu 22.04) but Netatalk I believe still works very well.

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

#38

Post by Jedd »

I note that $25 got the author 16GB of storage - another $70 was spent on boosting that to 2TB.

For GNU/Linux users - but will obviously work just fine for Microsoft and Apple clients - a good combination is SyncThing on local + remote mini-server, with BorgBackup running on just the server side.

SyncThing gives you near-instant synchronisation, and BorgBackup gives you periodic archives (at your periodicity & retention preferences).

For isolation purposes, I went for a small-footprint VM for each family member, and instructed that anything they really care about needs to go into ~/work/ or ~/private/ to be looked after.

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

#39

Post by tverbeure »

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…

In addition to Time Machine, I use iCloud for generic Mac apps, Backblaze for real disasters, and GitHub for all my personal projects. So my backup needs were already mostly covered without TM.

Though the one time I needed a full SSD restore, Time Machine was the fastest way to do it, and it worked like a charm, after literally 8 years of not looking at it.

But if I want to switch to CCC, you run their client app on your Mac, but how do you set up the server? Is it just a Linux NAS running Samba?

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

#40

Post by harry8 »

solarkraft wrote: post #33

Thin clients are great, I got a Fujitsu Futro. Bohdi Linux: Interesting choice. Personally I've tried to set up Samba as a Time Machine backend twice and with both setups the initial backup would just completely lock up after a while. I might try again with Netatalk, but thought AFP was deprecated.

Time machine with netatalk, I use the technique described here:

https://palvelimet.net/1116/

Took about 5 minutes, Works for me.

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