Is anyone else using borgbackup on their Mac? It lets me dedupe across OSes and computers, better than Time Machine. I’ve been using it for years and have accumulated some paths to exclude in my home folder, but constantly unsure if I should be excluding some other system metadata.
ThinMachine – A $25 thin client macOS Time Machine appliance
81–90 of 189 posts
Re: ThinMachine – A $25 thin client macOS Time Machine appliance
#82My 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…
Can I use CCC to backup to something like an AWS bucket of Backblaze B2 if I don't have a NAS in my house?
Generally I think the use case is "duplicate the boot volume of my machine onto an attached usb drive" though I think these days not all Macs will boot from an external drive? I have SuperDuper doing scheduled backups like this, along with Backblaze for offsite (but not so bootable) backups.
Re: ThinMachine – A $25 thin client macOS Time Machine appliance
#83Is netatalk the key thing here that makes it Time Machine compatible? The rest seems like standard DIY home server stuff.
> Is netatalk the key thing here that makes it Time Machine compatible? The rest seems like standard DIY home server stuff. The last update to AFP shipped with Mac OS X Mountain Lion in 2012 [1]. Nobody should be using AFP in 2023, unless you have no other choice. While you can use Time Machine to backup to an SMB share, ideally you want to use an APFS volume to get all of the benefits, especially if you're concerned…
Time Machine created an APFS sparse bundle on the SMB share. How is an APFS sparse bundle on an APFS volume better than an APFS sparse bundle on another volume?
Re: ThinMachine – A $25 thin client macOS Time Machine appliance
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
Time Machine creates an APFS sparse bundle on any network share. Even if the disk is APFS.
Re: ThinMachine – A $25 thin client macOS Time Machine appliance
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can I use CCC to backup to something like an AWS bucket of Backblaze B2 if I don't have a NAS in my house?
Generally I think the use case is "duplicate the boot volume of my machine onto an attached usb drive" though I think these days not all Macs will boot from an external drive? I have SuperDuper doing scheduled backups like this, along with Backblaze for offsite (but not so bootable) backups.
Ever since a few major macos versions ago, I don't think that is possible anymore.
Re: ThinMachine – A $25 thin client macOS Time Machine appliance
#86Thin 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.
Somebody on Twitter recommended the Futro as well, but they seem to be a European thing. There are none for sale on US eBay.
Re: ThinMachine – A $25 thin client macOS Time Machine appliance
#87Re: ThinMachine – A $25 thin client macOS Time Machine appliance
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
what about on apple silicon macs?
You can’t boot off of non internal storage because Apple
You can, it's just less easy than in the pre-T2 Intel Mac days.
https://eclecticlight.co/2021/06/02/booting-an-m1-mac-extern...
Re: ThinMachine – A $25 thin client macOS Time Machine appliance
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can’t boot off of non internal storage because Apple
You can, it's just less easy than in the pre-T2 Intel Mac days. https://eclecticlight.co/2021/06/02/booting-an-m1-mac-extern...
Ah, when I installed Asahi a while back I read that it wasn’t possible to install to an external drive and must have gotten it confused with not being able to install any OS to an external drive.
Re: ThinMachine – A $25 thin client macOS Time Machine appliance
#90My 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. 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. 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 anywhe…
I mean Apple was never perfect. But I could at least understand that, in the old days they were nearly bankrupt, they had comparatively speaking extremely limited resources. And they had to focus on certain things and neglect others. iPhone arguably took all their resources from 2005-2015. But somewhere along that line they had way more resources than they need or know how to spend on it. Some of the lacking attention and details no longer makes any sense. And not only have to not gone to fix it. Their quality has gone downhill.
It is sad. You would expect a bigger Apple to be a better Apple. But almost like everything in life they are counter intuitive.