I use Carbon Copy Cloner to have a replica of my drive. However, I still use Time Machine as a convenience to go back in time for my mistakes. My daughter thinks I'm one of those nerds that married a regular girl from college and can do magic with software because I can make her computer go back in time and bring back versions of her files.

> My daughter thinks I'm one of those nerds that married a regular girl from college and can do magic with software because I can make her computer go back in time and bring back versions of her files.

Wait until she discovers git!

As an aside, I wish there was an alternative like Time Machine on Windows.

There is, it's called File History and it's built in. I think it's been available since Vista.

Like TM you need an external or network drive to use it. Unlike TM it's not very intuitive and Microsoft doesn't do much to advertise it.

I mean that's 'per drive' though. If you drive goes tits up so does your history of all files on that drive.

Windows has one habit which I detest and I don't know why it acts this way: if you leave your drive disconnected for long enough, it will disable File History entirely and nag you about reconnecting and re-setting it up all over again. That recalcitrance is what discourages me from keeping it going at all. I just give up, it's not important enough to keep going through all that.

If it were really important for Windows not to have the drive disconnected for too long, it would issue pre-emptive warnings before the timeout was reached, but it doesn't, it just shames you after the horse has left the barn.

File history in Windows is based on shadow copies (Snapshots) that run from the server at a scheduled point. The explorer client just accesses those snapshots.

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.

In my experience there's no need to worry about long term disk usage of Time Machine. The backup is going to get in a bad state and start failing to add new backups, requiring you to wipe it and start over before the drive fills up.

My anecdata is the opposite of yours. My backup history is over 15 years old!

I started backing up using Time Machine when I got my first Mac in 2006. Migrated my sparsebundle from my first Time Capsule to another when I needed a bigger one, then migrated that to a number of other drives drives over the years (which thankfully never failed, but I replaced them every 4 years). Have successfully restored from a backup onto at least ten different laptops (I was upgrading every year for a while). I have literally only ever had “one” Time Machine backup in the entire time that I have had a Mac. Honestly, I’m blown away it still works.

I maintain other backups too, I’m not crazy to think that this is rock solid, but at this point I’m keeping it going just to see how long it will last.

That is very impressive!

Up to a few years ago I was constantly hosing my TM drive and starting fresh.

TM has supported multiple destinations for a good long while, so in the past I was always running two TM destinations.

BTW, side note, with SSD prices crashing, I should be able to get rid of the spinning-rust and the luxury of silent local SSD TimeMachines running!

I’ve had this happen enough to just expect it “someday” and learned not to fight it.

When Time Machine goes stupid, just wipe it and start over. Any efforts to try and recover or repair are just folly. Just watch your life tick away for days and days only to inevitably fail.

It doesn’t happen often, but does happen every couple years. Many times it’s an indicator the drive is bad.

That said, I’ve never had a problem recovering from TM. Whether it’s a single file, directory, or a complete reinstall.

I have TM for my main drive, and use BackBlaze for everything (including my main and media drives).

In my experience, I've been using TM ever since it was released, without these problems - and I've used it to transfer to new machines multiple times.

I've also never had a problem with Time Machine since it launched.

I used to find that.

Lately, for the last few years, I haven't had that problem.

Before TrueNAS I was using an M1 Mac Mini with a USB3 JBOD as TM destinations.

Ditto. I use TimeMachine to both my TrueNAS server and a local drive (when I remember). I use Arq to B2 for my home directory.

For family members, I have them use TM + Backblaze.

CCC costs $77.50 AUD per major version just to use the app - it might be OK but that's a lot of money!

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

> TimeMachine is free and "good enough" for local / local network backups for most people

If you backup to an APFS-formatted network share, Time Machine is quite good and much more reliable than it was when backing up to HFS+ volumes. There was a lot of hackery going on to make HFS+ act like a modern file system emulating snapshots, which it didn't have. You could end up with millions of hard links; turns out that was kinda fragile…

APFS supports snapshots and a bunch of other features that makes Time Machine faster and more reliable.

Is it possible to have a Linux server provide an APFS-formatted network share? Or does it require a Mac Mini + external drive in a closet?

Time Machine creates an APFS sparse bundle on any network share. Even if the disk is APFS.

Yes, I use truenas to serve an apfs bundle over smb on a zfs pool. Works perfectly with no issues.

Yeah you can use any Linux or BSD system. That includes NAS devices like QNAP, Sinology etc… that serve up a network share via Samba or NFS.

I use TM with both a local usb SSD and a samba network share on my home server which works great - I use XFS on the server but because it’s encrypted by TM it creates an APFS sparse container within the share.

Yes, it is pricey. But you get what you pay for. The attention to detail in the documentation and patch release notes from Bombich is on point.

Zero regrets from my end about the money spent for it and it is one of the few software products where the price tag seems justified.

FWIW I first bought a license in 05/2019. The only major version update since then has been in 07/2021. And the license for the upgrade cost $30.47 AUD. They don't seem to be exploiting version updates as a form of revenue generation.

And yes, I'm sure there are backup solutions that work better in different scenarios. My main point is that Time Machine is rubbish for full system backups. CCC is polished, powerful, robust and power user friendly and one option that I have been super happy with.

Can I ask what you find inadequate about Vorta? I've recently started using it and it seems perfectly functional to me (although it's probably not an app I'd recommend to someone who doesn't already understand borg).

It’s x86 / intel only so runs in emulation mode, the GUI is clunky, confusing and slow, it spews errors every time my machine sleeps and doesn’t make managing exclusions easy.

Agreed, I use it because I use borgbase for server backups but I wouldn’t recommend it, especially on laptops. The backups stalls every other time after waking up from sleep.

As far as i know, Backups can't run as "root" with Vorta... right? So it's a limited backup.

There’s no real need to back up root owned files on macOS though, applications are all owned by the user and have their data sandboxed and user container anyway.

No files that you’d want to back up, should be owned by root.

I respectfully disagree... :-)

Simple example: `/Library/Keychains/`

There are many important folders, not accessible by standard users.

Ah I see, yeah if you store your secrets in keychain that’s even more of a reason to ensure you have multiple backup locations too.

It’s the cost of a Mac.

You’re probably spending upwards of $1000 USD to buy your Mac. You’d might as well factor in the one time (or maybe two time if you need to upgrade the major version again during the lifetime of the mac) purchase of a backup solution into the cost of your Mac.

Because relying on Time Machine basically means your computer is a ticking time bomb just waiting to lose your data.

Why? You don’t need a Mac to read or write a DMG or to host a network share.

A lot of money… until you need to recover data and would pay SO MUCH more just to get your data back.

I think it’s a fantastic price.

Why would I need to pay any money to get my data back using Timemachine, Borg, Duplicity etc… though? That doesn’t really make sense.

I think they're maybe alluding the fact that if you have a backup system which fails when you need to use it (e.g. your Time Machine backup turns out to be corrupted, which quite a few people in the comments seem to have experienced), you'd wish that you'd paid money to have a backup system which worked instead.

You wouldn’t usually just have a single backup system, If the disk image that time machine is stored on head issues that would usually be picked up at the time. It was being mounted and either repaired or you’d get less that the discount is corrupt. it’s never going to be as good as something like Borg where you’re doing regular data consistency checks but you can still check the fast system of the DMG as frequently as you wish.

I don't think backup is a place where you want to go cheap really. Also 80€ every couple of years should be nothing when you can afford a Mac.

Over the years, I've used both CCC and SuperDuper in order to have bootable backups. I've always used these in addition to TimeMachine though.

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.

In addition to Time Machine, I use iCloud for generic Mac apps, Backblaze for real disasters, and GitHub for all my personal projects. So my backup needs were already mostly covered without TM.

Though the one time I needed a full SSD restore, Time Machine was the fastest way to do it, and it worked like a charm, after literally 8 years of not looking at it.

But if I want to switch to CCC, you run their client app on your Mac, but how do you set up the server? Is it just a Linux NAS running Samba?

CCC is great although it’s not quite as useful as it is on Intel Macs on AS ones because the whole paradigm of “clone the drive onto a USB and boot it” doesn’t work.

what about on apple silicon macs?

You can’t boot off of non internal storage because Apple

Of course you can.

You can, it's just less easy than in the pre-T2 Intel Mac days.

https://eclecticlight.co/2021/06/02/booting-an-m1-mac-extern...

Ah, when I installed Asahi a while back I read that it wasn’t possible to install to an external drive and must have gotten it confused with not being able to install any OS to an external drive.

I had a weird issue with ccc and the dev and I couldn’t figure it out, so I switched to TM. I also use backblaze and local rsync’s.

> 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 no support and the forums are not going to help.

and

> Time Machine uses the "fuck you user" approach

apply to every piece of software or service out there by Apple. Every single one!

iCloud? The only answer you’re going to get “No, your data is getting synced”. “Why don’t you enable and disable it”. Or “restart it”. My favourite is when Apple Support asks you to reinstall the reset the iOS or reinstall macOS if something as tiny as some sync problem with such confidence and matter of fact tone that you are forced to debate whether you are talking to some kafkasque and sadist bot.

This is the Apple playbook. Naming and shaming them on social media does work. Emails don’t get answered. Your customer request gets stonewalled. Sometimes you maybe it’s Apple paying you to use their products and the other way round.

An ex manager was thought to be crazy by us freshers when he would tell the moment he gets a Mac, for personal or work uses, the first thing he does is install Linux on that. We used to think he was some GNU/FOSS nut. He would smile and used to say - give it time, you’ll understand.

And I understand now how helplessly hostile the Apple ecosystem feels. You literally feel like a hostage — you can use it with such stonewalling limits!

At this point I don’t think it’s anything other than self sabotage if anyone still says

- but I also use Time Machine - it works, or is “good enough”

- or relies on something like iCloud for something like “data backup and integrity” in anyway.

Can’t wait for the day when file access is easier on iOS (of course aft explicit permissions - which is the case even today actually) etc, or Android sucks less - in this glorious duopoly.

Agreed. Have a 14 MBP. Nice hardware. MacOS makes me want to scream and tear my hair out.

Is the rubber around your screen starting to peel and degrade? I have a 2014 and the rubber just comes off if I rub it with a finger.

2019 and the stuck on piece of plastic under the screen saying MacBook Pro is bubbling and peeling from the heat of the machine.

2014 MacBook Pro, and the rubber around my screen is also failing.

But, honestly, it's 9 years old and still going strong. Which is exceptional for a laptop used basically every day for those 9 years.

Yea I mean I'm not complaining. Was just curious. Don't see a lot of 2014s still being used. I wish I could send it to Apple for a refurb lol.

I sent my 2005 MacBook Pro in to get the GPU repaired and it came back with a new case - top and bottom - no charge! I was pleasantly surprised.

You quite likely can? Especially if you go to a non-Apple, but Apple-authorized repair shop -- they'll have access to the parts, and will likely be willing to do it.

It might be an integrated component though? ie. you might need to pay for a new screen, not just the rubber?

I don't know, I have an 11y old HP elitebook from 2011 and nothing aesthetic is failing. It has however seen a battery replacement and some memory and ssd upgrades. I think battery and hard drive should be the only thing we should expect to replace in a 10y lifespan.

Agreed. And in this case, the rubber failure is almost entirely aesthetic: it does keep the screen away from the lower chassis/keyboard when closed, but you don't need _all_ of it to do that.

In my case, there are a few spots where the rubber's shape is no longer smooth: small bits have worn away and/or broken off. There's a few small bits on the top, and the lower right-hand side feels quite rough.

But it won't stop me continuing to use this laptop as my main personal machine for a little while longer (until OCLP can't get me security patches any longer).

Pretty sure they mean a 14" MacBook Pro, not a 2014 one

No, it's an M1 14in not a 2014.

I mean Apple was never perfect. But I could at least understand that, in the old days they were nearly bankrupt, they had comparatively speaking extremely limited resources. And they had to focus on certain things and neglect others. iPhone arguably took all their resources from 2005-2015. But somewhere along that line they had way more resources than they need or know how to spend on it. Some of the lacking attention and details no longer makes any sense. And not only have to not gone to fix it. Their quality has gone downhill.

It is sad. You would expect a bigger Apple to be a better Apple. But almost like everything in life they are counter intuitive.

Around 2007 I remember complementing apple ux to a long time multiple eras of job graybeard apple employee and he sighed with frustration and said "apple really cares about user experience when they're not doing well, but as soon as the money comes in it goes out the window"

So far it's tracked pretty well

Hah, I think I hit a nerve there. I hear you. Overall I'm actually super happy with my Macbook. Luckily for the most part no one is forced to use the Apple eco system.

CCC for system backups. Tresorit for backing individual directories with a bit more privacy and flexibility than Dropbox.

I don't think it's self-sabotage to keep using apple software, but more a case of people not having been in the situation where things go wrong and there is nothing you can do :)

How do you use Tresorit for backup?

Personally I just use it for my documents and similar folders. It's not intended for full system backups. It's pretty much like Dropbox, but it's end-to-end encrypted so personally I feel better about trusting it with my documents.

I agree on iCloud, which behaves in a very erratic and intransparent way. Don’t rely on it. I use Nextcloud instead and it works much better. One software that syncs extremely well with iCloud is Obsidian, for reasons unknown (to me).

> Time Machine works fine until it doesn’t

I have been backing up to Time Machine for years without issues. Recently I started using pnpm (Nodejs package manager) and the backup process hangs on Mui material icons files (@mui/icons-material). Using "sudo fs_usage -f filesys backupd" I see that it is looping over the same files over and over.

I have found that Asimov alleviates this issue.

https://github.com/stevegrunwell/asimov

I wrote a tiny blurb about it here:

https://nabeards.com/time-machine-backups-ignoring-npm-modul...

Carbon Copy Cloner has a mode to periodically check backup integrity, and will alert you on mismatch. Given that unlike ZFS, APFS doesn't actually checksum user data, it's worth it for that feature alone. If you use ZFS for your backup destination, then this effectively ends up giving you verification of your non-ZFS source as well. And even if you don't backup to ZFS, then you still get notified that corruption was detected, allowing you to triage and take action.

I think it's CCC5 or CCC6 that actually exposed the list of file mismatches to the user UI, but the diffs were greppable in the diagnostic logs all the way back to CCC3.

Most Time Machine weirdness comes down to metadata mismatches after migrating from machine to machine.

I made some fairly simple shell scripts to help fix these issues.

https://github.com/torstenvl/tmutils

> Time Machine works fine until it doesn't.

I experienced this a couple years ago when I somehow had a directory name with a UTF-8 byte order mark, causing mysterious Time Machine failures: https://www.davidschlachter.com/misc/timemachine-encoding-no...

Can I use CCC to backup to something like an AWS bucket of Backblaze B2 if I don't have a NAS in my house?

Generally I think the use case is "duplicate the boot volume of my machine onto an attached usb drive" though I think these days not all Macs will boot from an external drive? I have SuperDuper doing scheduled backups like this, along with Backblaze for offsite (but not so bootable) backups.

Ever since a few major macos versions ago, I don't think that is possible anymore.

Maybe if the location can be mounted as a network drive. But I'd say it would be making it do something it is not intended to do. I'd say it is really meant for backing up to external storage or drives on the local network.

There are probably better tools for this.

I also use CCC — in addition to Time Machine, running on a tiny little SD card sitting flush inside the laptop. https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1687325-REG/transcend...

CCC is great, but it doesn’t back up in near-real time and doesn’t do versioning. It wouldn’t have saved my butt while I was on the road last Friday like “built-in” Time Machine in my SD slot did.

How reliable do you find it? I suppose if it's just for catastrophic emergencies, it will probably work through needing to use it. I'm guessing it will fail to write before it fails to read.

Probably? But two or three years for a fifty dollar chip is nothing to sniff at.

How does this work with mounting/unmounting, power cycling, etc.

It doesn’t unmount unless you eject it. No issues with power cycling.

It's not really an issue if the 'errors are cryptic' though.

You just restore the OS without the time machine backup and then you browse the time machine backup manually and copy the files you want. It's usually just a random file it can't read correctly in it's index so it breaks the whole thing, it's not like the whole backup is useless, you can manually browse all the files and you are still good, not sure how that is the 'fuck you user' approach.