I don't care about marketing gimmicks, fancymoji, "mail stationery" or other crap. I care about having a stable operating system where I can get work done. I care about having a Mail.app that WORKS.

I think we are in an unfortunate situation where Apple's solutions (hardware+software) are far better than the competition, but still suck. And competing with Apple these days is immensely difficult: you need to have huge capital reserves (which Microsoft has), and execute well on good combined hardware+software designs (this is where Microsoft doesn't quite hit the mark).

I wish Apple had a competitor which would make "it Just Works" hardware and software. But I'm afraid we are stuck for the time being.

Better yet, stop shipping iMacs with magnetic hard drives. This is 2020.

The other purpose is backups. Again if my backups are slow, who cares?

I care very very very much about the speed of the drive that stores my video files. I need to be able to open and seek through them quickly so I can find the clip I'm looking for. When you're working with ProRes stuff, this becomes a big deal.

Luckily, good quality spinning hard drives can be fast enough, at least for my needs. Unfortunately, they're only fast enough when they're not running APFS. :(

Nothing prevents you from putting for videos on an HFS+ volume and use it from Catalina. It just can't boot from one.

In my opinion the base included option should be a reasonably sized M.2 SSD, with an option to increase the size of said M.2, or to add a 1TB (or larger) 2.5" drive as an extra if more storage is needed.

Can someone please point out what the issues are? I am not challenging this statement, it is just that I am not aware of any specific issues with Time Machine so I am a bit worried about any problems (and if there is anything I can do to mitigate the risks). I am using a separate, third party cloud backup but I still count on Time Machine for day-to-day operations.

Thanks in advance to anyone that could give me more info about this.

Since then I only use Carbon Copy Cloner [0]. It has very very very excellent documentation and it is well the worth the purchase. The documentation covers lots of backup scenarios, how to do recovery and dealing with error cases. It also lets you create bootable backups on external drives, though I have only used it for backups over the network.

I'm not affiliated, but I can't praise their work enough.

[0] https://bombich.com/

I lost probably a day (to a day and a half tidying things up and cleaning up stuff that was not my fault) and of course I have no decent way of managing audiobooks now.

Rsync is a good tool but CCC gives massive quality of life. Some of that won’t even be possible with rsync. And rest would require building a complicated set of scripts. Paying Bombich, to deal with all the headaches and mac os shenanigans, $50 every couple of years is a much better deal.

And its not a lock-in like other backup tools. You can access specific files inside the backup without CCC.

CCC + Arq cover all my bases when it comes to backup and restore.

I suspect the root cause is some 3rd party software interaction. But since the 3rd party software I have is installed and required by my employer, it's hard to do an A/B comparison.

I need + 15 gb free for TM swap stuff.

Apple is notorious for not giving ANY feedback so i only found out after sesrching for a long time on google.

Apple please stop silently failing without messages.

"The only visible symptom is that a few minutes after each backup starts, it ends without copying all that it promised at the start of the process."

So you mean it ends "too quickly"? How can you tell if it missed some files?

[1]: https://eclecticlight.co/2019/11/11/time-machine-and-backing...

For what I understood it happens when the macbook is forced to go to sleep/loses connectivity while in the middle of a backup. It doesn't cleanly unmount the remote file system and it causes data corruption.

There are some ways of "restoring" the remote FS but they may or may not work, are very slow, opaque (what actually was fixed?) and flaky.

I just switched to an external USB drive for Time Machine and not looking back

Anyway, as your digital life flashes before your eyes, TM helpfully offers to delete all your backups and start with a fresh disk image now, or delete all your backups and start with a fresh disk image later. And you can't blame it, really, because the filesystem has had some unknown, nonzero amount of corruption for an unknown, nonzero amount of time. For all anyone knows or can prove, the whole backup is random garbage.

This fractal of failure is specific to backups over WiFi. Backups to USB-connected disks aren't that reliable either, because HFS+, but USB backups have all the nines of reliability compared to network backups.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-21/apple-ios...

In theory this is more or less what they have been doing (with both iOS and Mac), they just have been batching up the stabilization and slapping a whole new version number on it. But I don't disagree.

Catalina could certainly do with a refinement release for internals (e.g. APFS) as well as UI polishing.

Disclaimer: I've been using Catalina as my main OS since it came out.

Is your point that you believe other people are just hallucinating their problems, or that you believe they've 'used it wrong' and brought problems on themselves, or that if you personally haven't experienced a bug, then it's not an important bug?

It happens when the sightings are emotional. For instance:

The Colorado Mystery Drones Weren’t Real

The mysterious drone sightings that captured national attention were a classic case of mass hysteria.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/884xv3/the-colorado-myste...

Flip side of same phenomenon is the "snappier" meme.

BTW, I did finally upgrade to Catalina last week and it’s been going fine, with the exception of losing 50% of my Steam library to the 32-bit graveyard....

When someone loses their data because they don't know how to use a computer it is easy to just blame the vendor.