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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

#61

Post by nabeards »

telcy wrote: post #59
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…

> Time Machine works fine until it doesn’t 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.

I have found that Asimov alleviates this issue.

https://github.com/stevegrunwell/asimov

I wrote a tiny blurb about it here:

https://nabeards.com/time-machine-backups-ignoring-npm-modul...

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

#62

Post by saagarjha »

Ok so like this seems to have been written today but I think it’s notable that the Mac they showed in the post is running a five year old version of macOS: I don’t actually think this is a good idea anymore, and I say this as someone who ran a Raspberry Pi in a similar configuration for a while.

Today, if you’re using Time Machine, you should back up to an APFS volume with snapshots. They are far faster and more reliable than HFS+ disks. I get the feeling that macOS might at some point stop supporting new HFS+ backups altogether. So, I wouldn’t recommend making them anymore.

Unfortunately, APFS drivers for Linux kinda sorta don’t exist. Not to the point where you’d want to rely on them for backups, anyways. So the move here is really to just get a Mac to handle this. My network has an old MacBook Pro (one of the last pre-Touch Bar ones) wired into the backbone for this. It’s pricey but believe me, this is the setup you want.

(By the way, if you’re using Time Machine to a network share, I recommend keeping another “worst case” backup that you refresh periodically. The network disk is convenient which is good for having periodic backups and quick access but from time to time this setup is liable to Time Machine corrupting itself in a way it doesn’t know how to fix.)

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

#63

Post by rfrey »

housemusicfan wrote: post #27
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?

No malice intended, but I genuinely felt as if you had wasted your own time. Sorry if I don't subscribe to the usual HN tug-fest. If you learned something - good for you but I've been down this exact road many times before. Oftentimes I have to mentor younger engineers that there is often a much simpler solution if you can see the forest for the trees.

So many asses out there excusing their self indulgent rude behaviour as "telling it like it is".

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

#64

Post by torstenvl »

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…

Most Time Machine weirdness comes down to metadata mismatches after migrating from machine to machine.

I made some fairly simple shell scripts to help fix these issues.

https://github.com/torstenvl/tmutils

They're pretty beta so if you use them please be careful. There are confirmations for major metadata changes, and the dirdedupe script runs in test mode by default (you have to use the --execute flag if you want it to actually do anything).

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

#65

Post by scorxn »

tverbeure wrote: post #43
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.

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.

I feel ya. My RPi does indeed have a case, with a fan. The backups are offloaded to an external HDD.

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

#67

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

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.

That seems pretty similar to this, just swapping out the thin client and pi (and the exact Linux distro, if that matters). Which makes it a trade in all the particulars:), depending on exact price, power use, etc.

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

#68

Post by dddddaviddddd »

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…

> Time Machine works fine until it doesn't.

I experienced this a couple years ago when I somehow had a directory name with a UTF-8 byte order mark, causing mysterious Time Machine failures: https://www.davidschlachter.com/misc/timemachine-encoding-no...

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

#69

Post by hoherd »

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.

Correct.

> If given the choice between SMB and AFP, use SMB to back up to your external backup disk.

https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/types-of-disks-you-...

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

#70

Post by bwbmr »

alwillis wrote: post #47
smcleod wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> TimeMachine is free and "good enough" for local / local network backups for most people If you backup to an APFS-formatted network share, Time Machine is quite good and much more reliable than it was when backing up to HFS+ volumes. There was a lot of hackery going on to make HFS+ act like a modern file system emulating snapshots, which it didn't have. You could end up with millions of hard links; turns out that wa…

Is it possible to have a Linux server provide an APFS-formatted network share? Or does it require a Mac Mini + external drive in a closet?
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