Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

ThinMachine – A $25 thin client macOS Time Machine appliance

tomverbeure.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 189 posts

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

#121

Post by smcleod »

rhaway84773 wrote: post #103
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…

It’s the cost of a Mac. You’re probably spending upwards of $1000 USD to buy your Mac. You’d might as well factor in the one time (or maybe two time if you need to upgrade the major version again during the lifetime of the mac) purchase of a backup solution into the cost of your Mac. Because relying on Time Machine basically means your computer is a ticking time bomb just waiting to lose your data.

Why? You don’t need a Mac to read or write a DMG or to host a network share.

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

#122

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#123

Post by ChildOfChaos »

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…

It's not really an issue though.

You just restore the OS without the time machine backup and then you browse the time machine backup manually and copy the files you want. It's usually just a random file it can't read correctly in it's index so it breaks the whole thing, it's not like the whole backup is useless, you can manually browse all the files and you are still good, not sure how that is the 'fuck you user' approach.

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

#124

Post by earthnail »

smcleod wrote: post #29
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…

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…

A lot of money… until you need to recover data and would pay SO MUCH more just to get your data back.

I think it’s a fantastic price.

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

#125

Post by CTDOCodebases »

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.

I use Restic and backup to rsync.net. The only reason why I use them is because they use ZFS and have a admin/user account system that allows for immutable snapshots once everything is set up.

Honestly though it doesn’t matter. The backups are encrypted outside of the PC you are using Restic on. You just need a drive or a PC with storage space and SSH access that you can access.

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

#126

Post by [deleted] »

misnome wrote: post #113
gotschi_ wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#127

Post by hparadiz »

__d wrote: post #102
hparadiz wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

2014 MacBook Pro, and the rubber around my screen is also failing. But, honestly, it's 9 years old and still going strong. Which is exceptional for a laptop used basically every day for those 9 years.

Yea I mean I'm not complaining. Was just curious. Don't see a lot of 2014s still being used. I wish I could send it to Apple for a refurb lol.

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

#128

Post by argsnd »

hparadiz wrote: post #100
vGPU wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Pretty sure they mean a 14" MacBook Pro, not a 2014 one

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

#129

Post by chakintosh »

> My MacBook has 460GB of data. Time Machine backups are atomic: a backup either completes or it doesn’t. And when it doesn’t, the backup needs to start all over again.

> Initially, backups were ridiculously slow: around 2 Mbits/s, meaning it would take around 21 days to back up the full drive. During that time, you can’t power cycle the server or take your laptop out of your wifi network or you need to start all over again.

This is why I'd rather play with fire than subject myself to such stupid implementation of a basic backup function.

Post reply on HN