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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

#111

Post by jtbayly »

atombender wrote: post #95
ezfe wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When backing up to a local system it is extremely useable and reliable. It creates separate snapshot volumes for each backup and can be navigated in the Finder interface or using the fancy space interface. Also, backups over the network are possible and have worked well for me for a few years.

It's reliable except when it's not. I'm using Mojave, and currently fighting a bug where a local snapshot gets stuck. When I list the local snapshots, I see the old one, then a gap of several days, and then additional snapshots. From what I can tell, this snapshot is preventing space reclamation. The last month or so, I've constantly run out of disk space even when not doing anything special. As in actually run out o…

I doubt it. Good luck.

I think I have the same problem on Tahoe.

Re: TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe

#112

Post by danpalmer »

senderista wrote: post #100
jonhohle wrote: post #80

What 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…

A colleague joined the team for one of the most visible features in MacOS a few years ago and told me they had no automated testing.

Two things are almost always true about Apple:

1) Every team does something different because none of them talk to each other. There are very few horizontal programs across engineering there. As a result, processes and results vary greatly.

2) They're very "traditional" in many ways. They're not a fast moving engineering led company, they're a slow moving business and marketing led company. Engineering is not their secret sauce (except perhaps some bits of hardware engineering). They are sometimes the sort of org that says why both with automated tests when we have a QA team.

Re: TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe

#113

Post by opan »

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…

Outsider perspective here (never used Time Machine), but my first thought is that rsync works amazingly both local and over the network. Can't imagine why it being over the network would be a problem. If it can resume a partial transfer and compare checksums to ensure a match, what's the problem?

Re: TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe

#114

Post by k2enemy »

theden wrote: post #104

This happened to me and I finally ditched time machine for BorgBackup https://www.borgbackup.org/ Not as nice UI-wise, but at least it's stable

Vorta is a pretty nice GUI for borg on mac. Not as simple as Time Machine, but easier than creating launchctl entries.

https://vorta.borgbase.com

Re: TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe

#115

Post by Eric_WVGG »

Aurornis wrote: post #81
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.

> Time Machine is held in high regard for some reason (maybe the fancy scrolling interface when you look for files to restore?) There was a time in the past when Time Machine was reliable and well-designed. It made backups into a nice experience that were accessible to everyone. If your only experience with Time Machine is the modern incarnation with all of the flaws and seemingly missing QA process then I understand…

> modern incarnation with all of the flaws and seemingly missing QA process

… so I’ve been kind of biting my tongue on this thread because “works fine for me” is not interesting or helpful, but: it’s been working great for me since it was introduced in 2007.

Periodically a disk will get flaky or go bad, maybe once every 2-3 years. I’ll erase the drive and start over. I always have two backups running so there’s never danger of being completely unprotected.

I don't doubt the people having Time Machine problems, but they usually seem to involve some unusual setup like a NAS. But for every one person who has a problem and speaks up, I suspect there are hundreds or thousands who are just humming along without a hitch.

(and yeah, I do pray for a "Snow Tahoe," "oops all bug-fixes" MacOS release, and I’d love to hear that there’s a team working not just to make Time Machine more resilient, but to expand it to do local backups of iPhones and iPads… a guy can dream)

Re: TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe

#116

Post by dangus »

Apple should honestly just deprecate and remove it with the level of effort they put into Time Machine.

Look, face it, Time Machine is not really what Apple wants you to do. They want you to buy cloud storage and just store your documents (desktop and documents in iCloud Drive) there. Photos are in the photos app. Etc.

Maybe they should make a Time Machine cloud service to help them justify putting time into it just like iOS has cloud backups, which work incredibly smoothly. But it’s also possible macOS has too much baggage for that to work (then again, migration assistant also seems to work great.

Long story short, if you want this you probably should be working with a third party, something like tossing $5 a month at backblaze backup.

I’ve moved away from Mac and I’ve been having a great user experience with Pika backup, although it’s not quite analogous to Time Machine. Still, my Linux distribution is immutable, so backing up my home directory is pretty much the whole thing.

Re: TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe

#117

Post by lmm »

crazygringo wrote: post #76
doawoo wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Have you run memtest on the machine in question? That kind of problem sounds like a classic bad RAM symptom.

Re: TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe

#118

Post by dgroshev »

jbverschoor wrote: post #41
Nathan2055 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 NFS Yes, there's some bug in the backupd that panic.. no matter smb/nfs

I tried moving to NFS, but the level of complexity of NFS auth is just comical. I gave up after trying to set up a Kerberos server on the Synology that I was trying to access. It's too much.

Using unauthenticated NFS, even on a local network, is too dodgy imo.

Re: TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe

#119

Post by garyrob »

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.

With external SSDs plugged directly into a USB port, it's worked 100% fine for me and saved my butt a few times.

But, I haven't installed Tahoe. I may skip it entirely, hoping that they do a Snow Leopard-like clean-up-the-mess release in September.

Re: TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe

#120

Post by m463 »

jonhohle wrote: post #80

What 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…

I think they mostly test in an all-apple environment.

With third party stuff, maybe you'll get lucky, but no guarantees...

3rd party monitors, or keyboards, or mice (what's a mouse?) or ...SMB devices

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