Time Machine has one huge issue: when it doesn't work, it becomes a bigger problem.

Could you elaborate on how Time Machine doesn't work? It's been pretty trouble free for me; other than taking a ridiculously long time for the initial backup with no good indication of progress.

Simple:

- make a backup,

- have your Mac serviced; it will be returned wiped,

- try to restore from your backup - and it fails. It won't tell you why it failed, only that it failed.

The end.

OK. I have done that, several times [x], and didn't run into any problems.

I do wonder, though, what kind of integrity checks do Time Machine backups have. I've always treated TM as the first line of defence and, as such, it has worked well for me. However, in addition to TM, I have other offsite backups in the cloud for disaster recovery.

x) I haven't had my macs serviced several times, but I have restored from backups a handful of times due to, ahem, accidentally rendering the system unbootable a couple of times.

TimeMachine underneath is pretty much a fancier rbackup. There are no integrity checks, but there are checks for motherboard serial number, as that's how backups are matched to systems.

That said, a friend of mine had been complaining that TimeMachine backup didn't backup anything of his Homebrew-installed stuff...

In my case, I did the TM backup specifically because my Mac was going to be serviced (display; so accessing data was not a problem).

Otherwise, I don't use TM, I'm using another solution. It won't restore entire system and installed apps, just my files.

So with TM, it was Murphy I guess.

This is actually how I have TM set up. I ignore anything not in ~/Documents (or any other location with personal files). The other stuff is so easily replaceable that I'm not concerned if I lose it.

If you use network storage for backups (AFP server) backup can get corrupted if the network goes down, and in most cases I have seen it is unable to recover and continue. You just have to delete the whole backup and start from scratch. This is why I use Vorta (Borg GUI) on macOS instead.

OMFG...This is one reason why I just started using freefilesync and just mirror my data instead of my whole drive. That way I just gotta have the hard drive and I'm set. Although it sucks cause I have to redownload every piece of software again.

you missed a step.

- verify backup.

Goes right after make a backup.

Edit: I must say, when I have to send my machine in, I backup using TM, but I also image my drive.

Time Machine at least used to have a ton of reliability problems.

I'm hoping that it's improved recently which I suspect would happen especially after Apple switched to AppleFS. Time Machine on HFS+ was basically hacks extending hacks extending hacks extending HFS.

Time Machine is still on HFS+.

This can be said about any backup service, though. When the work, yay! When they don't, PANIC!

Same experience here. It can be a nightmare.

I strongly agree, while I'd rather run Linux, this is the reason I can't get off mac. I have restored backups at least 5 or 6 times over the years, including last week. Once, I had to jack around with wiping a fresh Catalina before the restore worked, because of APFS/HFS issues, which the restoration UI complained about. But it has always worked when I need it. Post-restore, I'm exactly back where I was. With hundreds of gigabytes of geospatial data, and a decade of software projects, I can't start from scratch without losing weeks of time.

I believe the Time Machine is a white elephant, a relic.

It ought to be able to do these things as good as (if not better) apps like restic, borg, backblaze etc : dedup, compression, unlimited versioning (at file level), integrity checks, granular search/restore, possibility to set a cloud destination (at least iCloud).

But a lot of these things it doesn't even try to.