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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

#111

Post by gotschi_ »

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…

Keep brew far away from your prod system. Everything you can‘t do in macos just use a vm. Don‘t touch the system and Timemachine will never corrupt, its that easy in my experience.

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

#112

Post by lostlogin »

newaccount74 wrote: post #107

After years of struggling with a NAS from a well known manufacturer, my solution is a 2012 Mac Mini. I replaced the internal 2,5" HDD with an 8TB SATA SSD. Advantages: - extremely reliable - completely silent - low power usage - all in one (no external drives, no external power brick) Disadvantage: - no longer officially supports latest macOS

Assuming you’re talking about Synology? Why is network attached storage so unreliable with macOS?

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

#113

Post by misnome »

gotschi_ wrote: post #111
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…

Keep brew far away from your prod system. Everything you can‘t do in macos just use a vm. Don‘t touch the system and Timemachine will never corrupt, its that easy in my experience.

But… brew doesn’t touch the system, and never did?

Even when it used /usr/local (before the root system became hard readonly) that was an unused folder path, and it explicitly refuses to install as root.

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

#114

Post by lostlogin »

rfrey wrote: post #63
housemusicfan wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Season five (I think) of Silicon Valley covers ‘radical candor’ it’s very painful and is a bit like this.

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

#115

Post by lostlogin »

filchermcurr wrote: post #48
mberning wrote: post #6

Synology has nice support for time machine backups. Very easy to set up in DSM.

Something happened around Big Sur that made Synology and Time Machine not get along for me. I set the share up with a quota and everything is great and happy. Time Machine backs up. But once that quota is exceeded, Time Machine complains about not having enough free space and quits. It used to delete old backups but now, no matter what I do, it just complains about free space and quits. :(

It’s really weird. The Mac is great, the Synology is amazing. They appear to hate each other.

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

#116

Post by newaccount74 »

lostlogin wrote: post #112
newaccount74 wrote: post #107

After years of struggling with a NAS from a well known manufacturer, my solution is a 2012 Mac Mini. I replaced the internal 2,5" HDD with an 8TB SATA SSD. Advantages: - extremely reliable - completely silent - low power usage - all in one (no external drives, no external power brick) Disadvantage: - no longer officially supports latest macOS

Assuming you’re talking about Synology? Why is network attached storage so unreliable with macOS?

Time Machine itself worked okay on Synology, it was just slow, despite two 480GB SSD cache drives.

My main issue were normal network shares where I had issues with unicode characters in filenames and with symbolic links. Depending on whether you'd use SMB or AFP one thing or another was broken.

My Mac Mini now works flawlessly. Time Machine is still slow, though, I think it's just a slow protocol.

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

#117

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

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.

Just start with an external usb drive. You can pickup 8tb for under $200. If you want to go the extra step, you can buy two or three and physically swap them every N weeks. Store the older one at a different location.

Far less sophisticated than a real NAS, but also fewer moving pieces and things to go wrong.

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

#118

Post by puzzlingcaptcha »

Jedd wrote: post #38

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 & retent…

You can often get those for as little as $10 these days, I paid $25 in 2020.

Interestingly the APU supports AES-NI and has a little crypto accelerator for SHA (unlike RPi which didn't splurge the extra dollar on Armv8 Cryptography Extensions).

I'd recommend going for t620 over the t520 for double the cores at the same idle power draw (6.5W).

If you are fine with just two cores Fujitsu Futro s520 is also great.

https://heap.ovh/tag/thin-client.html

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

#119

Post by mfashby »

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.

Local NAS and backblaze. It works well.

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

#120

Post by gsora »

manmal wrote: post #104

Apple Silicon MacBook Pros come with an SD slot. There are some MicroSD adapters (I use a BaseQi 303A) that are flush with the case - so flush infact that they are a bit hard to remove. Those are excellent for TimeMachine backups.

MicroSD are notorious for being unreliable, especially cheap ones. What MicroSD are you using?
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