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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

#141

Post by uselpa »

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…

I agree on iCloud, which behaves in a very erratic and intransparent way. Don’t rely on it. I use Nextcloud instead and it works much better. One software that syncs extremely well with iCloud is Obsidian, for reasons unknown (to me).

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

#142

Post by DavideNL »

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).

As far as i know, Backups can't run as "root" with Vorta... right? So it's a limited backup.

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

#143

Post by uselpa »

smcleod wrote: post #97
rcthompson wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agreed, I use it because I use borgbase for server backups but I wouldn’t recommend it, especially on laptops. The backups stalls every other time after waking up from sleep.

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

#144

Post by graybies »

bwbmr wrote: post #70
alwillis wrote: post #47

Earlier 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?

Yes, I use truenas to serve an apfs bundle over smb on a zfs pool. Works perfectly with no issues.

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

#145

Post by bartvk »

microtonal wrote: post #134
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…

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. [1] https://www.arqbackup.com

Seconding Arq.

It's incredibly freeing to be able to dump your remote backups wherever you have space. Right now, the best for me is to send them to a virtual Linux box where I have enough space left.

It supports Amazon Drive, AWS, Backblaze B2, Dropbox, Filebase, Google Cloud, Google Drive, OneDrive, SFTP, SharePoint, Storj, Wasabi, network share or some other random S3-compatible server.

It's a native, let me repeat that, NATIVE Mac app and behaves exactly like one. Incredibly satisfying. Unlike Time Machine, it'll tell you what went right and what went wrong. I have a lifetime license.

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

#146

Post by manmal »

gsora wrote: post #120
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?

Use a good one, then. I haven’t spotted any issues after 18 months of use.

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

#147

Post by gsora »

manmal wrote: post #146
gsora wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Use a good one, then. I haven’t spotted any issues after 18 months of use.

I explicitly asked for the model/maker of your microSD so that I could :-)

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

#148

Post by klik99 »

ksec wrote: post #90
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…

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 attentio…

Around 2007 I remember complementing apple ux to a long time multiple eras of job graybeard apple employee and he sighed with frustration and said "apple really cares about user experience when they're not doing well, but as soon as the money comes in it goes out the window"

So far it's tracked pretty well

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

#149

Post by donatj »

mustache_kimono wrote: post #37
st3fan wrote: post #25

I’m not sure if AFP (via Netatalk) is really the right thing to use. I’m pretty sure that “native” Time Machine now prefera CIFS (Samba) over the network.

> I’m not sure if AFP (via Netatalk) is really the right thing to use. For years, Netatalk was still the more dependable solution, despite the deprecation warnings. I've had very good luck re: my current set up (ZFS and Samba 4.15.13 on Ubuntu 22.04) but Netatalk I believe still works very well.

Agreed, I still generally have much better luck with Netatalk which is why I have kept using it all these years.

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

#150

Post by yanellena »

guraf wrote: post #41
908B64B197 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My daughter thinks I'm one of those nerds that married a regular girl from college and can do magic with software because I can make her computer go back in time and bring back versions of her files. Wait until she discovers git! As an aside, I wish there was an alternative like Time Machine on Windows.

There is, it's called File History and it's built in. I think it's been available since Vista. Like TM you need an external or network drive to use it. Unlike TM it's not very intuitive and Microsoft doesn't do much to advertise it.

File history in Windows is based on shadow copies (Snapshots) that run from the server at a scheduled point. The explorer client just accesses those snapshots.
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