Don't use time machine, I would never trust it (basically unreliable from my experiences).
Better use a fast external SSD only for backups and Carbon Copy Cloner regularly.
ThinMachine – A $25 thin client macOS Time Machine appliance
131–140 of 189 posts
Re: ThinMachine – A $25 thin client macOS Time Machine appliance
#132I used to do a similar thing - I set up a Debian VM and let it serve netatalk and behave like a Time Capsule for my home network.
Now I use a mix of iCloud to keep files in sync (DropBox to transport between Macs and Linux) and dock-attached local storage to host the Time Machine volumes.
Re: ThinMachine – A $25 thin client macOS Time Machine appliance
#133My 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…
I also use CCC — in addition to Time Machine, running on a tiny little SD card sitting flush inside the laptop. https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1687325-REG/transcend... CCC is great, but it doesn’t back up in near-real time and doesn’t do versioning. It wouldn’t have saved my butt while I was on the road last Friday like “built-in” Time Machine in my SD slot did.
How reliable do you find it? I suppose if it's just for catastrophic emergencies, it will probably work through needing to use it. I'm guessing it will fail to write before it fails to read.
Re: ThinMachine – A $25 thin client macOS Time Machine appliance
#134I 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…
People who want something similar may want to look at Arq [1]. Similar to restic, it provides incremental encrypted backups to most cloud providers (or a machine with SSH). But it is a Mac app, making it easy to configure and maintain. I never had issues with data corruption so far.
Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with them, just a happy user for 9 years.
Re: ThinMachine – A $25 thin client macOS Time Machine appliance
#135... you probably want to just use Debian or Ubuntu instead of random fork that might or might not exist in 5 years
Re: ThinMachine – A $25 thin client macOS Time Machine appliance
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Can confirm about MicroSD flash cards, they're too unreliable for stuff that must be on 24/7, and get corrupt easily. Good for tinkering projects and media players, not for critical stuff where the downtime needed to pull the card and fsck/reinstall it might not be an option.
For something critical, especially one which already involves an external drive, there is zero reason to store your root fs on an SD card. Booting using other methods has been supported for literally years.
Re: ThinMachine – A $25 thin client macOS Time Machine appliance
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've found that the ideal size of Timemachine drive is just about twice of the target drive. It last for months if not years -- enough to go back. Beyond that, there must be an archival/backup system in place if you still want to get back files deleted years ago.
In my experience there's no need to worry about long term disk usage of Time Machine. The backup is going to get in a bad state and start failing to add new backups, requiring you to wipe it and start over before the drive fills up.
In my experience, I've been using TM ever since it was released, without these problems - and I've used it to transfer to new machines multiple times.
Re: ThinMachine – A $25 thin client macOS Time Machine appliance
#138I 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.
FUD. brew has nothing to do with Time Machine corruptions.
Re: ThinMachine – A $25 thin client macOS Time Machine appliance
#139> My electricity rates are $0.56/kWh during peak hours and $0.25/kWh otherwise, for an average of $0.35/kWh.
Wow, that's high compared to where I live.
Re: ThinMachine – A $25 thin client macOS Time Machine appliance
#140Is 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.
Yes... you might find this useful: info on Exclusions [1] and Snapshots [2]
[1] https://github.com/SterlingHooten/borg-backup-exclusions-mac...
[1] https://github.com/QuantumGhost/borg-tm
[2] https://gist.github.com/QuantumGhost/1aae8eb8527c9d522fe2a57...