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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

#21

Post by MBCook »

gghffguhvc wrote: post #8
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.

Time Machine is for the everyday person. The everyday person doesn’t have a few thousand dollars to buy a second machine just to properly test a full restore backup periodically.

They don’t cost that much. And there are cheaper options.

Most computers Apple sells are laptops. By a huge margin.

So what am I supposed to do? Put my laptop in the same spot every night, plug it in, plug in the drive, and then the next morning carefully make sure the drive is unmounted before I move my laptop anywhere?

That’s kind of ridiculous. Network storage works. Apple has supported it for years.

If they don’t want to support this, don’t let the OS do it. Until then, don’t break my backups.

Re: TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe

#22

Post by Nathan2055 »

unsnap_biceps wrote: post #6
andrewmcwatters wrote: post #5

Apple has broken Time Machine enough times that I would never consider using it at all anymore. Once upon a time, it was really neat, had great integration with Mac OS X, and an amazing user interface and experience, but it's now clearly technology that Apple will probably eventually drop entirely in favor of something less impressive all together, like telling you to buy more iCloud Storage.

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 great (other than the normal underlying annoyances of SMB that everyone with a NAS is mostly used to at this point).

The new ASIF format for disk images added in Tahoe actually works very well for this sort of thing, and gives you the benefits of sparse bundle disk images without requiring specific support for them on the underlying file system.[1][2] As long as you're on a file system that supports sparse files (I think pretty much every currently used file system except FAT32, exFAT, and very old implementations of HFS+), you get almost native performance out of the disk image now. (Although, again, that's just fixing the disk image overhead, you still have to work around the usual SMB weirdness unless you can get another remote file system protocol working.)

[1]: https://eclecticlight.co/2025/06/12/macos-tahoe-brings-a-new...

[2]: https://eclecticlight.co/2025/09/17/should-you-use-tahoes-ne...

Re: TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe

#23

Post by tonyedgecombe »

Time Machine has always been a bit ropey on SMB shares. I think it’s in part because it creates a disk image on the share then writes to that. This creates a lot more work and potential for things to go wrong.

If you want to backup across the network then it’s probably best to choose some third party software.

Re: TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe

#24

Post by Aurornis »

roadbuster wrote: post #16
Aurornis wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but it also seems like he backed up and didn't test the restores. Which isn't good practice. For a professional devops person managing a custom backup solution, I agree. For someone using mainstream consumer technology on a consumer laptop, it's not realistic to expect this. It needs to just work.

> For someone using consumer technology on a consumer laptop Mounting an SMB share on a Synology NAS to use as a Time Machine backup target is not what most users would consider "consumer technology."

That’s definitely in the range of what consumers do these days.

The consumer NAS business is large. These are popular items with average consumers who understand the importance of backups.

It’s reasonable to expect it to work properly.

Re: TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe

#25

Post by btreesOfSpring »

I have been trying to trouble shoot a Time Machine issue since upgrading to Tahoe. It is usb backup. So far none of the most recent stated fixes work.

An initial backup on newly formatted disk will run but very slowly. Perhaps reaching 100% but it never finishes. At some point the percentage will change and the backup will stay stuck at somewhere near 10%. Cancel backup and run it again. Gets to ~10% and stays stuck. Multiple drives. Re-fs'ed. Boot into safe mode. Networking off. Etc, etc. etc. The TimeMachineMechanic app doesn't have any revealing feedback. I can run a full tar backup to the same disks.

No idea.

I haven't tried backing up to a network share but really, it shouldn't be this difficult.

Clearly someone didn't test a bunch of edge cases when pushing this one out.

Re: TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe

#26

Post by Aurornis »

ndegruchy wrote: post #14
Aurornis wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but it also seems like he backed up and didn't test the restores. Which isn't good practice. For a professional devops person managing a custom backup solution, I agree. For someone using mainstream consumer technology on a consumer laptop, it's not realistic to expect this. It needs to just work.

I'm not in devops. I don't even have a server aside from the basic usage I get out of my Synology. However, I have lost data in my lifetime. If you value your backups, check on them. Also, if you're the kind of person who has a Synology, it means you had to buy a NAS, drives, and setup all the associated machinery for Time Machine over your network. Therefore, I feel it's not outside of the expectation that you can c…

> Also, if you're the kind of person who has a Synology, it means you had to buy a NAS, drives, and setup all the associated machinery for Time Machine over your network

I don’t understand why people think this is complicated or limited only to highly technical people.

NAS units are popular with consumers now, not just tech people. They buy them with drives installed and they come with instructions to set up backups with Windows and Mac.

Re: TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe

#27

Post by hughw »

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 existing backups.

edit: I use Arq for daily backups, but T.M. for hourly. When T.M. eventually craters its storage, I have robust dailies in the cloud, so no worries.

Re: TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe

#28

Post by roadbuster »

hughw wrote: post #18
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…

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

Re: TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe

#29

Post by hughw »

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

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

Re: TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe

#30

Post by maxkfranz »

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...

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