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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

#91

Post by climb_stealth »

crossroadsguy wrote: post #58
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. 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…

Hah, I think I hit a nerve there. I hear you. Overall I'm actually super happy with my Macbook. Luckily for the most part no one is forced to use the Apple eco system.

CCC for system backups. Tresorit for backing individual directories with a bit more privacy and flexibility than Dropbox.

I don't think it's self-sabotage to keep using apple software, but more a case of people not having been in the situation where things go wrong and there is nothing you can do :)

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

#92

Post by ashconnor »

kmeisthax wrote: post #16
pridkett wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

I've given up on it and bought a SSD to do local backups. My new plan for the Synology is to get Minio running on it and then use Arq Backup to send the data.

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

#93

Post by climb_stealth »

s3p wrote: post #74
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…

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?

Maybe if the location can be mounted as a network drive. But I'd say it would be making it do something it is not intended to do. I'd say it is really meant for backing up to external storage or drives on the local network.

There are probably better tools for this.

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

#94

Post by bombcar »

tverbeure wrote: post #80
saagarjha wrote: post #62

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 reli…

Yeah, I wrote this on a 2012 MacBook Pro running Mojave. My replacement MacBook Air 15” will be ready for pickup in a week. :-)

You can still do this setup (I have it on Gentoo) but I also have a local SSD for when I’m docked. It alternates between them.

Nowadays it’s done with some special extensions to samba instead, but it works the same.

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

#95

Post by tailspin2019 »

sandreas wrote: post #42

I don't trust Time Machine any more. Years ago I wrote some shell scripts that help me mostly automate my complete system setup (with brew and friends). From time to time, I wipe my entire system and restore it with these scripts. Sometimes I have to adjust them, but mostly, they work without changes. For my data backups, I use restic. Big advantage is, that I can read my backups even when I don't have a macOS system…

What destination(s) do you backup to with Restic? I've been thinking about giving it a try.

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

#96

Post by smcleod »

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…

I use TM with both a local usb SSD and a samba network share on my home server which works great - I use XFS on the server but because it’s encrypted by TM it creates an APFS sparse container within the share.

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

#97

Post by smcleod »

rcthompson wrote: post #71
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…

Can I ask what you find inadequate about Vorta? I've recently started using it and it seems perfectly functional to me (although it's probably not an app I'd recommend to someone who doesn't already understand borg).

It’s x86 / intel only so runs in emulation mode, the GUI is clunky, confusing and slow, it spews errors every time my machine sleeps and doesn’t make managing exclusions easy.

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

#98

Post by krackers »

climb_stealth wrote: post #17
murphyslaw wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In the pre-APFS days, there was one difference in that using time machine would give you snapshots whereas CCC would only be a "dest like source" backup (safetynet would preserve deleted files, but not version modified ones). You could work around this with ZFS snapshots on the destination, but since it's not natively supported it's all a bit clunky. With APFS you get snapshots too, so the only real difference is the UI for restoring a snapshot.

I do wish Apple would allow 3rd party applications to populate "versions", so the inbuilt UI could be used with other apps. It could even fit with their existing Finder extensions: it could bring together different versions of a file on cloud providers, local backups, etc., and present them in a unified UI.

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

#99

Post by sandreas »

tailspin2019 wrote: post #95
sandreas wrote: post #42

I don't trust Time Machine any more. Years ago I wrote some shell scripts that help me mostly automate my complete system setup (with brew and friends). From time to time, I wipe my entire system and restore it with these scripts. Sometimes I have to adjust them, but mostly, they work without changes. For my data backups, I use restic. Big advantage is, that I can read my backups even when I don't have a macOS system…

What destination(s) do you backup to with Restic? I've been thinking about giving it a try.

My home nas and via zfs send the off site nas from my parents.

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

#100

Post by hparadiz »

vGPU wrote: post #79
crossroadsguy wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Agreed. Have a 14 MBP. Nice hardware. MacOS makes me want to scream and tear my hair out.

Is the rubber around your screen starting to peel and degrade? I have a 2014 and the rubber just comes off if I rub it with a finger.
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