21–30 of 189 posts
I cannot comment on TimeMachine, but regarding hardware + Linux, it has been a more stable server than equivalent RPi or Odroid SBCs while not consuming much more power and just having a bigger size.
My advice to retain your sanity: stop using Time Machine and use Carbon Copy Cloner [0] instead. It works. It keeps working. It has excellent documentation for any possible backup and restore cases. It is transparent about what it is doing. Time Machine works fine until it doesn't. And it won't tell you that a backup is broken until you try to restore from it. The errors are going to be cryptic. There is going to be…
My advice to retain your sanity: stop using Time Machine and use Carbon Copy Cloner [0] instead. It works. It keeps working. It has excellent documentation for any possible backup and restore cases. It is transparent about what it is doing. Time Machine works fine until it doesn't. And it won't tell you that a backup is broken until you try to restore from it. The errors are going to be cryptic. There is going to be…
My advice is to use TimeMachine plus other backups. I use: 1. TimeMachine on a 20TB TrueNAS ZFS setup 2. BackBlaze 3. ...not a versioned backup, but iCloud Synching, which is a useful disaster recovery.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah this is as pointless as every "life hack" on YouTube. Haven't you been able to Time Machine backup to any HFS-formatted sparse bundle since forever? Located on literally ANY samba server - Windows, Linux, or ye olde NAS. I have personally done this for years. I don't get the novelty here unless you're into the "I built a submarine with parts I got off eBay" angle.
I write these blog posts for primarily for myself, and hopefully because somebody might find them useful. I claim no novelty, there are no ads, no traffic tracking, there is no intention whatsoever to make money from it. But if my posts irritate some jerk on the Internet who has nothing better to do than spread negativity, then that’s definitely a nice unintended benefit. Do you need a hug?
Amen.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah this is as pointless as every "life hack" on YouTube. Haven't you been able to Time Machine backup to any HFS-formatted sparse bundle since forever? Located on literally ANY samba server - Windows, Linux, or ye olde NAS. I have personally done this for years. I don't get the novelty here unless you're into the "I built a submarine with parts I got off eBay" angle.
I write these blog posts for primarily for myself, and hopefully because somebody might find them useful. I claim no novelty, there are no ads, no traffic tracking, there is no intention whatsoever to make money from it. But if my posts irritate some jerk on the Internet who has nothing better to do than spread negativity, then that’s definitely a nice unintended benefit. Do you need a hug?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My advice is to use TimeMachine plus other backups. I use: 1. TimeMachine on a 20TB TrueNAS ZFS setup 2. BackBlaze 3. ...not a versioned backup, but iCloud Synching, which is a useful disaster recovery.
I've found that the ideal size of Timemachine drive is just about twice of the target drive. It last for months if not years -- enough to go back. Beyond that, there must be an archival/backup system in place if you still want to get back files deleted years ago.
My advice to retain your sanity: stop using Time Machine and use Carbon Copy Cloner [0] instead. It works. It keeps working. It has excellent documentation for any possible backup and restore cases. It is transparent about what it is doing. Time Machine works fine until it doesn't. And it won't tell you that a backup is broken until you try to restore from it. The errors are going to be cryptic. There is going to be…
TimeMachine is free and "good enough" for local / local network backups for most people, for remote backup BorgBase (although the "Vorta" borg GUI app is dreadful) and Backblaze are affordable-ish options.
Also it doesn't look like CCC has write-only backups (immutable from the client side once created) like Borg has, there's no mention of encryption or deduplication in their feature list either - https://bombich.com/features
My advice to retain your sanity: stop using Time Machine and use Carbon Copy Cloner [0] instead. It works. It keeps working. It has excellent documentation for any possible backup and restore cases. It is transparent about what it is doing. Time Machine works fine until it doesn't. And it won't tell you that a backup is broken until you try to restore from it. The errors are going to be cryptic. There is going to be…
I currently use TM to both my TrueNAS server and to a local disk (when I remember to plug it in). I use Arq to B2 for my home directory.
For my family, I have them use Backblaze. It's the only thing I've found that's really set and forget. They never remember to plug in a local TM drive. And setting up TM with a network drive, it flakes out every few months, then they just ignore the messages from TM that their drive isn't being backed up.
Backblaze pretty much Just Works. And it sends me an email report once a week.
A full restore via Backblaze would be a bit painful. But it's better than no backup at all.