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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

#41

Post by jbverschoor »

Nathan2055 wrote: post #22
unsnap_biceps wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

In the past, I've heard recommendations not to use remote Time Machine over SMB directly, but rather to create an APFS disk image on a remote server and then backup to that as if its an external hard drive. Supposedly, doing that eliminates a lot of the flakiness specific to SMB Time Machine, and while I haven't tested it personally, I have used disk images over SMB on macOS Tahoe recently, and they actually work gre…

SMB on macOS is and always has, and probably will always be utter shit.

Mount something over NFSYes, there's some bug in the backupd that panic.. no matter smb/nfs

Re: TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe

#42

Post by maxkfranz »

ndegruchy wrote: post #33
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.

You can just use the UI to make whatever schedule you want (monthly, daily, every Monday, etc.). I think it edits your crontab behind the scenes. I set it to daily, but you could set whatever you want. You can even have multiple schedule entries, similar to cron.

Edit: Yeah, the bootable backups have saved me more than once. It's great to just be able to keep working even when the system disk is kaput.

Re: TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe

#43

Post by DwnVoteHoneyPot »

chmaynard wrote: post #4

Another disturbing example of sloppy execution by Apple Software Engineering. This only reinforces my resolve to avoid upgrading to macOS Tahoe.

I just switched back to Sequoia. I gave Tahoe a good shot, used it for 4 months. Tahoe is half-baked. I upgraded to Tahoe because most of the complaints were cosmetic which I don't care about at all, but the problems are worse than cosmetic.

The last straw is that Finder's scroll bars are broken in Tahoe. I put up with it until I hit an emergency at work and was working as fast as I could (each minute mattered), Tahoe was slowing me down. Tahoe didn't pass the pressure test.

Re: TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe

#44

Post by Wowfunhappy »

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.

> maybe the fancy scrolling interface when you look for files to restore?

That's why I like it. Some of the visual flare is of course superfluous, but the timeline really is nice.

It's like git except it works without me having to think about it. (To be clear, git is much better, but I have to think about it.)

Re: TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe

#45

Post by BugsJustFindMe »

roadbuster wrote: post #28
hughw wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that 5% number real or your estimate?

It's a hand-waved estimate, but let's recognize that Apple actively plans on killing support for NAS targets for Time Machine: > Time Machine backup to NAS devices over Apple Filing Protocol (AFP) is not recommended and won't be supported in a future version of macOS. https://support.apple.com/en-us/102423

AFP is what's deprecated, not Time Machine over networks. They just want you to use SMB.

Re: TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe

#46

Post by [deleted] »

hughw wrote: post #29
roadbuster wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a hand-waved estimate, but let's recognize that Apple actively plans on killing support for NAS targets for Time Machine: > Time Machine backup to NAS devices over Apple Filing Protocol (AFP) is not recommended and won't be supported in a future version of macOS. https://support.apple.com/en-us/102423

But that's AFP, not SMB. SMB is the future. [edit, that sounds sad].

[deleted]

Re: TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe

#48

Post by PunchyHamster »

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…

> The bigger question is why does Time Machine continue use a network file system for backups?

The problem is them fucking up. Every other popular backup solution that does it does it just fine. And doesn't hide failures silently

Re: TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe

#49

Post by PunchyHamster »

ndegruchy wrote: post #2

I use the same setup and was able to restore some files I recently deleted. My SMB settings in Synology were set to what the recommended settings were already. Not sure what happened in this person's case, but it also seems like he backed up and didn't test the restores. Which isn't good practice.

> Not sure what happened in this person's case, but it also seems like he backed up and didn't test the restores. Which isn't good practice.

Regardless he should've gotten alert if backup target is unusable, not silently break

Re: TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe

#50

Post by PunchyHamster »

roadbuster wrote: post #12

Article title is a bit dramatic. The summary seems to be: for the 5% of users who back-up to a network share (rather than direct-attached storage like a USB hard drive enclosure), Apple's default SMB configs on Tahoe are strict and won't work out of the box with many common NAS solutions. Apple should document such changes, but, looking at the post title, you'd think they were silently corrupting data during restorat…

> Article title is a bit dramatic. The summary seems to be: for the 5% of users who back-up to a network share (rather than direct-attached storage like a USB hard drive enclosure), Apple's default SMB configs on Tahoe are strict and won't work out of the box with many common NAS solutions.

I'd argue that's not even the main problem. If it just broke and gave you error on each run ("this SMB share is incompatible") it wouldn't be an issue

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