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

151–160 of 189 posts

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

#151

Post by prmoustache »

__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.

I don't know, I have an 11y old HP elitebook from 2011 and nothing aesthetic is failing. It has however seen a battery replacement and some memory and ssd upgrades. I think battery and hard drive should be the only thing we should expect to replace in a 10y lifespan.

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

#152

Post by prmoustache »

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…

I don't think backup is a place where you want to go cheap really. Also 80€ every couple of years should be nothing when you can afford a Mac.

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

#154

Post by smcleod »

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?

Yeah you can use any Linux or BSD system. That includes NAS devices like QNAP, Sinology etc… that serve up a network share via Samba or NFS.

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

#155

Post by smcleod »

earthnail wrote: post #124
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…

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.

Why would I need to pay any money to get my data back using Timemachine, Borg, Duplicity etc… though? That doesn’t really make sense.

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

#156

Post by smcleod »

DavideNL wrote: post #142
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).

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

There’s no real need to back up root owned files on macOS though, applications are all owned by the user and have their data sandboxed and user container anyway.

No files that you’d want to back up, should be owned by root.

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

#157

Post by pixiemagic »

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…

Would you be able to share those scripts? Or if not, an obfuscated/abstracted version of them?

I use brew but even with brew and brew cask, I find there's plenty of GUI apps that require manual installation, which will also have their own config spread out in various places, plus whatever CLI or background stuff I've installed myself (mostly hidden files/directories in my home folder so probably easier), system settings, etc. I don't know how I'd reasonably automate a restore of all of that stuff without having a Time Machine-style backup (essentially a disk image).

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

#158

Post by pixiemagic »

bartvk wrote: post #145
microtonal wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 repea…

It looks great but I suppose the downside, like a lot of nice native Mac apps, is that it seems to be Mac-only. So if you also want to back up non-Mac systems (e.g. to make off-site backups of NAS or server data), you'll need to set up, maybe pay for, and grok 2+ backup systems.

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

#159

Post by msh »

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?

Generally go for ones sold as for "industrial" use.

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

#160

Post by msephton »

Eric_WVGG wrote: post #78
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…

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 does this work with mounting/unmounting, power cycling, etc.
Post reply on HN