I never trusted Time Machine, my primary line of defense is rsync to a server running ZFS with hourly snapshots, and weekly rotations of offsite drives. For bootable backups, Carbon Copy Cloner.
TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe
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Re: TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe
#72The 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?
As opposed to what? When you need to be able to back up to a drive on your network?
Re: TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe
#73Tahoe backups to UnRAID's native Time Machine backup system (as described at https://docs.unraid.net/unraid-os/using-unraid-to/manage-sto...>) does not work in UnRAID 7.2.3. It is not (solely) caused by Tahoe, however, because it did work in 7.1.4. https://forums.unraid.net/topic/195091-time-machine-backup-d...>
mbentley's Docker image version of Time Machine—which I began using back when native Time Machine support was completely broken https://www.reddit.com/r/unRAID/comments/16x3ddm/my_experien...>—which the post mentions is unaffected, and continues to work with Tahoe without configuration changes.
Re: TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe
#74I 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.
Hi! OP here. No, that was not it. Time Machine just quietly failed to do any backups and I failed to notice they weren't happening.
I use a self-hosted healthchecks.io watchdog timer instance to monitor jobs like these and alert if they don’t complete. Of course TimeMachine doesn’t have a way to signal successful completion, unlike, say, Carbon Copy Cloner. Given Apple software quality’s accelerating downward trend, I’d suggest switching to rsync/rclone instead, or Borg/Kopia if you want GUI-driven restores for non-technical members of your family.
It’s long past time you flipped the bozo switch on Apple, the title of your blog notwithstanding.
Re: TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe
#75Time 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.
Agreed, exactly matches my experience over SMB. It works at first, then eventually refuses to work until you delete it start again from scratch. Eventually I just gave up.
Re: TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe
#76If 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.
This 100% - it’s funny how it’s actually more reliable in my experience to use the encrypted sparse bundle. I can sling it over to my NAS no problem. I’ve restored from one and everything was perfectly fine. YMMV of course
That was my experience at first, but then it gets corrupted somehow and you have to delete it and start over. Happened to me multiple times with RAID 1, so pretty sure it's a software error -- I eventually just gave up.
Re: TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
To the contrary. Time Machine is for consumers. Most people use it either with an external hard drive (good for iMacs that stay in one place) or a NAS (good for MacBooks). Apple even sold the AirPort Time Capsule at one point. Since that was discontinued, Synology NAS is the main consumer-friendly alternative. It comes with dedicated Time Machine support. It's supposed to be easy setup and forget. That's the whole po…
> [Synology] comes with dedicated Time Machine support Your umbrance is with Synology, not Apple. Apple raised security default configurations in Tahoe. That led to a config breakage with NAS devices which rely on relaxed security configurations. I agree Apple should publish a technical note / changelog of config changes such as this one, but Apple has never implied to users they'd carry a support burden for any/all…
I wasn't even assigning blame, did you mean to reply to someone else?
I was just replying to your point that a Synology NAS "is not what most users would consider 'consumer technology.'" It's firmly in the consumer technology category.
Re: TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe
#78Another disturbing example of sloppy execution by Apple Software Engineering. This only reinforces my resolve to avoid upgrading to macOS Tahoe.
Avoid it as long as possible. Mail search is broken 4 out of 5 days that I attempt a search, and I need to go to the webmail versions of my accounts to find anything. Fortunately it's only something I need to do about once a day, unlike in prior lives, but holy crap they took the best ruing about macOS and kids destroyed jt completely. Plasma on Linux is looking pretty tempting these days, especially with almost all…
Geary or Thunderbird are excellent mail clients.
Re: TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe
#79Time 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.
I think because it is probably one of the only backup solutions (or first) that went after the average user to get them to actually backup. Plug a USB drive in, click yes to the prompt, and they’re done.
It has its flaws, but any system is better than no system at all, which is usually the trade off that would be made.
Re: TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe
#80What is Apple’s QA process? Do they rely on some random set of manual tests that may or may not get run each release? There have been so many things that seem like one of the most valuable companies in the world would include in tests, but yet break or remain broken.
As an experiment, open Console and filter just errors and faults. Dozens to hundreds of “errors” will scroll by representing the normal operation of the system. (Either they’re not really errors and no one cares or they really are errors and Apple just leaves their systems broken). How can anyone think this is OK?
I haven’t upgraded to Tahoe. I have been a Mac power user for over 20 years, and it becomes less interesting every release. I came for Unix, the script ability, and 3ᴿᴰ party applications. Unix is an afterthought, script ability is all gated behind security gates, and modern apps seem like such a huge regression.