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TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe

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Re: TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe

#31

Post by ndegruchy »

Aurornis wrote: post #26
ndegruchy wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not in devops. I don't even have a server aside from the basic usage I get out of my Synology. However, I have lost data in my lifetime. If you value your backups, check on them. Also, if you're the kind of person who has a Synology, it means you had to buy a NAS, drives, and setup all the associated machinery for Time Machine over your network. Therefore, I feel it's not outside of the expectation that you can c…

> Also, if you're the kind of person who has a Synology, it means you had to buy a NAS, drives, and setup all the associated machinery for Time Machine over your network I don’t understand why people think this is complicated or limited only to highly technical people. NAS units are popular with consumers now, not just tech people. They buy them with drives installed and they come with instructions to set up backups…

I get what you're saying. I will only quibble that the consumers in the market for a NAS, regardless of ease-of-setup, is still bordering technically inclined. My mother-in-law has enough trouble with her iPhone, let alone a server-type-device that she needs to administer.

I would imagine a more typical consumer would be buying a USB or Thunderbolt connected drive and following the prompts to set it up.

My impression is that companies like Backblaze and other backup-as-a-service solutions are more consumer-popular because it externalizes the complexity and pitfalls like the author is experiencing.

Re: TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe

#32

Post by codeulike »

Time Machine is held in high regard for some reason (maybe the fancy scrolling interface when you look for files to restore?) but it's not really useable. It pretends that backups-over-the-network are a possibility but its completely unstable over the network and invariably decides the backup is corrupt after a few months and then tells you you have to start from scratch.

Re: TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe

#33

Post by ndegruchy »

maxkfranz wrote: post #30

I'm a big fan of SuperDuper [1]. I use it for daily differential backups to a secondary SSD. I don't get the hourly backups that TimeMachine has, but my SuperDuper backups are directly bootable in the event that my system disk dies. I'm sure you could do the same with cron and rsync, but I can't be bothered. [1] https://shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.ht...

This has been on my to-buy list for a while. Something I should probably do, because while recovery from the built-in recovery interface is fine, having an offline bootable backup is also great. It also doesn't interfere with having Time Machine be the "standard" backup.

I could probably setup a calendar appointment to dump a bootable image once a month to an external disk.

Re: TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe

#34

Post by tlb »

If you set Time Machine to use encrypted backups, it will create a fake disk that's really a directory tree with a bunch of gigabyte-sized binary chunks. This is safer because it doesn't require the file system to support anything fancy like symlinks or case-insensitive unicode file names. One downside is that restoring to anything other than a Mac is nontrivial.

Re: TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe

#35

Post by ndegruchy »

H8crilA wrote: post #13

The author posted a fix, but how do I check if there is a problem in the first place?

I would try to do some restores of random files. Kind of a "canary in the coal mine" test. If you have problems with restoring some files or folders, then you'll have a problem with doing larger restores.

Re: TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe

#37

Post by [deleted] »

hughw wrote: post #27

The bigger question is why does Time Machine continue use a network file system for backups? It's so fragile you can't rely on it. It's gotten better in recent years, possibly due to APFS, but that just means somewhat longer intervals between disasters (wipe out and reinitialize, losing all your backups). A T.M. using a custom protocol to save and restore blocks would fail sometimes too, but not ruin all your existin…

[deleted]

Re: TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe

#38

Post by dijit »

codeulike wrote: post #32

Time Machine is held in high regard for some reason (maybe the fancy scrolling interface when you look for files to restore?) but it's not really useable. It pretends that backups-over-the-network are a possibility but its completely unstable over the network and invariably decides the backup is corrupt after a few months and then tells you you have to start from scratch.

idk, works for me.

On the extremely rare occasion I have to replace my laptop, I literally just point it to the backup on the network with the cable plugged in, and an hour later it's "my laptop" again.

Re: TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe

#39

Post by whartung »

unsnap_biceps wrote: post #6
andrewmcwatters wrote: post #5

Apple has broken Time Machine enough times that I would never consider using it at all anymore. Once upon a time, it was really neat, had great integration with Mac OS X, and an amazing user interface and experience, but it's now clearly technology that Apple will probably eventually drop entirely in favor of something less impressive all together, like telling you to buy more iCloud Storage.

Hasn't the issues always been related to remote Time Machine? I have a usb drive I use and haven't heard of any issues with that setup. Am I missing something?

I lose my Time Machine drive, like, every year or two.

Sometimes, Time Machine just goes stupid and I have to wipe the drive and start over. All of my efforts in the past to copy or repair or do anything to a Time Machine drive has ended in folly, so when it starts acting up, I just wipe it and start anew.

Other times, it's the drive itself, and I swap it out.

99% of the time, it Just Works. Wiping the drive for me is more annoying than catastrophic (99.9999% of the time I don't care about my 18 month old data). It's mostly for local catastrophic fat fingering on my part, and to make sure I have a solid back up after I do a OS update. I have BackBlaze for "Why is there 5 feet mud in my burning house" scenarios.

Outside of that, I've always been able to recover from it.

My wife has a SSD drive she plugs into her laptop for TM backup. That machine at most makes laps around the house, so its not that big of a deal for her.

Re: TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe

#40

Post by _rs »

H8crilA wrote: post #13

The author posted a fix, but how do I check if there is a problem in the first place?

I agree - I am running my own Samba server and I don't think I'm affected, but it isn't really clear to me how to double check or why Apple's new default broke things in the first place
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