If you set your Apple device to beta updates for the previous release you can suppress the constant prompts to upgrade. Reduces the chance of accidentally upgrading.
The hedgehog knows one great thing. This is it. Thank you.
TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe
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Re: TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe
#52If you set your Apple device to beta updates for the previous release you can suppress the constant prompts to upgrade. Reduces the chance of accidentally upgrading.
How do you do that?
Re: TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
AFP is what's deprecated, not Time Machine over networks. They just want you to use SMB.
Acknowledged. Thanks for pointing that out.
Re: TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe
#54I 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.
> 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. Regardless he should've gotten alert if backup target is unusable, not silently break
100%
My biggest gripes with Time Machine are the lack of visibility, the silent failures and the inflexible scheduling. I know there are methods to work around the last one, but the first two are paramount. It does do consistency checking, at least as far as the logs say, but it says nothing about the health of the backup container.
While most users don't really want to know about this stuff, I feel like it's important enough to have a more comprehensive UI to provide some insight into the feature and the associated health.
Re: TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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."
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 third-party hardware vendors. To the contrary, they've notified users that you're meant to consult with your NAS vendor for configuration steps:
> Check the documentation of your NAS device for help setting it up for use with Time Machine
Re: TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe
#56If you set your Apple device to beta updates for the previous release you can suppress the constant prompts to upgrade. Reduces the chance of accidentally upgrading.
How do you do that?
Settings -> General -> Software Update -> Beta Updates
It's the same on macOS and iOS, pick "macOS Sequoia Public Beta" or the corresponding release for your device. Apple still pushes security updates for those releases, and I haven't heard of any problems with the kind of minor updates that ship late in a major release's lifecycle, so I think the risk of running this way is low. This kicks the can a year or two down the road, at which point hopefully there are better workarounds.
Re: TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe
#57If you set your Apple device to beta updates for the previous release you can suppress the constant prompts to upgrade. Reduces the chance of accidentally upgrading.
Be warned if you actually install beta software and take your device to the Apple Store they will not replace parts because of the chance the diagnostic tools aren’t compatible- this bit me trying to get my iPhone battery replaced
Re: TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe
#58Time 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.
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.
Re: TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe
#59If 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
Re: TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe
#60On Linux we get this for free with Btrfs copy on write snapshots, snapper, and Btrfs Assistant.