ThinMachine – A $25 thin client macOS Time Machine appliance

Post by Eric_WVGG » Tue, Jun 27, 2023, 6:38 AM UTC

yurishimo wrote: post #133

Eric_WVGG wrote: post #78

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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.

Post by firecall » Tue, Jun 27, 2023, 8:58 AM UTC

wlesieutre wrote: post #28

Brajeshwar wrote: post #24

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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.

Post by firecall » Tue, Jun 27, 2023, 9:11 AM UTC

hoorible wrote: post #34

wlesieutre wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My anecdata is the opposite of yours. My backup history is over 15 years old! I started backing up using Time Machine when I got my first Mac in 2006. Migrated my sparsebundle from my first Time Capsule to another when I needed a bigger one, then migrated that to a number of other drives drives over the years (which thankfully never failed, but I replaced them every 4 years). Have successfully restored from a backup…

Post by pixiemagic » Wed, Jun 28, 2023, 1:36 PM UTC

sandreas wrote: post #169

pixiemagic wrote: post #157

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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 setti…

Unfortunatly, they contain too much sensitive information to provide them online and I don't have the time to make them nice and clean (it all started with a 50 lines bash script). But there are plenty of users providing macOS RICE / dotfiles... Just a short search: https://www.lotharschulz.info/2021/05/11/macos-setup-automat... https://gist.github.com/bradp/bea76b16d3325f5c47d4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFlnqS…

Post by ashconnor » Wed, Jul 05, 2023, 4:58 PM UTC

ashconnor wrote: post #92

kmeisthax wrote: post #16

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For me it was more like every day. I gave up on Time Machine very quickly. The underlying problem is that Time Machine stores a disk image over the network[0]. If the disk image is not unmounted cleanly, Time Machine treats it as horribly corrupted and refuses to touch it. And this happens very often if you're using a laptop that will be unexpectedly disconnected from its storage constantly. [0] This is to support th…

I've given up on it and bought a SSD to do local backups. My new plan for the Synology is to get Minio running on it and then use Arq Backup to send the data.