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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

#141

Post by Aurornis »

Eric_WVGG wrote: post #115
Aurornis wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

This

> … 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.

Is immediately contradicted by this

> 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.

Having to periodically erase the drive and start over is one of the problems we’re talking about.

In my experience, restoring files gets flakey before it reaches the point of having obvious backup failures so you may be experience more problems than you know about if this is happening periodically.

Re: TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe

#142

Post by ezfe »

atombender wrote: post #134
ezfe wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mojave is 7 years old so I think its safe to say you can't generalize

I meant Sequoia, but I can't edit my comment anymore. I've completely lost track of the OS releases after they stopped emphasizing the number.

Ah, gotcha - never mind then.

Re: TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe

#143

Post by fragmede »

Derbasti wrote: post #131
Aurornis wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Exactly my experience. I've used TimeMachine with external USB drives, Apple's own TimeCapsule router (am I remembering that name correctly?), and various NASes. None of them could maintain a stable backup for a year. And you know, a backup that can't back up, isn't a backup. I have since implemented a borg backup. This also failed at one point, but at least its five-year record remained readable, so no data was lost…

Arq for me.

Re: TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe

#144

Post by fragmede »

grandinj wrote: post #135

I suspect that Time Machine is no longer used by a sufficiently large % of their customer base for them to care, and they are slowly sunsetting it. They are quite aggressive about that sort of thing, so I expect it to to deprecated in favour of iCloud soon.

That's not a backup.

Re: TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe

#145

Post by fragmede »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #19
hughw wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that 5% number real or your estimate?

Yeah, it sounds a bit high to me.

People with laptops that don't want to be attached to a dongle for storage when there's the Internet sounds like < 5% to you?

Re: TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe

#146

Post by fragmede »

burnt-resistor wrote: post #102

I still don't understand why people insist on spending good money on a closed, proprietary appliance when they can run a general purpose, flexible server such as running Samba and NFS that can be tweaked to solve a variety of edge-cases that no closed system can match.

time > money

Re: TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe

#147

Post by Squids4Cows »

Also running Tahoe. Also backing up to SynologyNAS. Also have lost 'many' backup to unknown reasons (was it a new beta? Was it a new OS? , the NAS crash of 2025) whatever.

Also, I don't even have an /etc/nsmb.conf or /etc/smb.conf file on the mac ( Tahoe 26.3)

I think the last time I configured Time Machine for SynologyNAS I followed as many tutorials as I could and basically everything is working for both mine & my spouses machines. - until it crashes & I lose everything.

Re: TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe

#148

Post by compiler-devel »

pier25 wrote: post #94
compiler-devel wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometime around High Sierra, I changed my habit such that I don't upgrade to the next major release until August. By then, it's been patched a half dozen times or so. Yes, I'm basically a year behind all the time, but I don't need the new features.

Since Yosemite (which was really bad for me) I typically stay with a major version 2-3 years. Yosemite > El Capitan > High Sierra > Big Sur > Ventura > Sequoia I won't be installing Tahoe for the time being. Hoping macOS 27 will be an improvement.

Are you running Apple Silicon now? I’m still on an intel machine with Sequoia. I doubt that I’ll upgrade it to Tahoe this fall and stick with it until Sequoia stops receiving security updates. Then I’ll have to upgrade hardware I guess… hoping have things sorted by then.

Re: TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe

#149

Post by wlonkly »

opan wrote: post #113
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?

It's backups, not sync, so it needs to support things like incrementals/differentials, deduplication, retention rules, thinning, etc.

Re: TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe

#150

Post by wlonkly »

fmajid wrote: post #71

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.

I am a long-time CCC user, but bootable backups haven't been supported for a while now, basically since Big Sur -- if you're counting on that, make sure you're testing it regularly.

https://bombich.com/blog/2024/12/19/bootable-backups-have-be...

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