51–60 of 189 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
CCC is great although it’s not quite as useful as it is on Intel Macs on AS ones because the whole paradigm of “clone the drive onto a USB and boot it” doesn’t work.
what about on apple silicon macs?
That's smart. I've had 7 catastrophic drive failure in 20 years, 4 when I was using homegrown backup.
Due to my being sloppy / lazy, I still managed to lose a lot of data in 2 of the instances.
Homegrown backup solution isn't for me. :)
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.
RPis are great hobby electronics projects, but IMO they don’t have any benefit for this kind of use over a thin client? They’re more expensive, you need an extra RPi enclosure and power supply, you can’t use M.2 SSD sticks without an additional USB3 enclosure, they have a history of corrupting flash cards, and their idle power is only a little bit lower.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
There is, it's called File History and it's built in. I think it's been available since Vista. Like TM you need an external or network drive to use it. Unlike TM it's not very intuitive and Microsoft doesn't do much to advertise it.
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…
and
> Time Machine uses the "fuck you user" approach
apply to every piece of software or service out there by Apple. Every single one!
iCloud? The only answer you’re ever going to get anywhere is - “No, your data is getting synced”. “Why don’t you enable and disable it”. Or “restart it”. My favourite is when Apple Support asks you to reinstall or reset the iOS or reinstall macOS entirely even if something as tiny as some sync problem occurs, with such confidence and matter of fact tone that you are forced to debate whether you are talking to some kafkasque and sadist bot.
This is the Apple playbook. Naming and shaming them on social media doesn't work. Emails don’t get answered. Your customer request gets stonewalled. Sometimes you feel maybe it’s Apple paying you to use their products and not the other way round.
An ex manager was thought to be crazy by us freshers when he would say that the moment he gets a Mac, for personal or work usage, the first thing he does is install Linux on that. We used to think he was some GNU/FOSS nut. He would smile and say - give it time, you’ll understand.
And I understand now how helplessly hostile the Apple ecosystem is. You literally feel like a hostage — you can use it with such stonewalling and infuriating limits and you start feeling this is the only way!
At this point I don’t think it’s anything other than self sabotage if anyone still says
- but I use Time Machine (or any XYZ Apple thing that involves data integrity and reliability) - it works, or is “good enough”
- or relies on something like iCloud for something like “data backup and integrity” in anyway.
Can’t wait for the day when file access is easier on iOS (of course aft explicit permissions - which is the case even today actually) etc, or Android sucks less - in this glorious duopoly. I meant when they’re forced to open up their platform, because they’re not going to do it themselves!
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 have been backing up to Time Machine for years without issues. Recently I started using pnpm (Nodejs package manager) and the backup process hangs on Mui material icons files (@mui/icons-material). Using "sudo fs_usage -f filesys backupd" I see that it is looping over the same files over and over.
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 think it's CCC5 or CCC6 that actually exposed the list of file mismatches to the user UI, but the diffs were greppable in the diagnostic logs all the way back to CCC3.