> 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.