A brief history of Time Machine (2024)(eclecticlight.co)
eclecticlight.co
A brief history of Time Machine (2024)
https://eclecticlight.co/2024/09/07/a-brief-history-of-time-machine/
32 comments
As a recent Linux to MacOS convert, I have been eyeing Time Machine as a simple backup solution. From reading the comments here it sounds like this is a far-fetched idealistic goal which is disappointing.
This seems to have not always been the case so where did things go wrong with Time Machine? Was there a particular MacOS release that broke everything?
Also what is really the gold standard in terms of backups? On Linux land I never had a great system. All I did was manually copy my drive every 6 months to a few external disks using clonezilla and gparted. This was tedious and not very user friendly.
Recently I learned of ZFS with its CoW approach and support for snapshots & it has piqued my interest. However while it may be a strictly superior way of doing backups its still not very user friendly. I have to budget time to learn it, set it up and of course its absolutely hopeless to expect my non-technical friends/family to figure it out.
Ultimately I'm seeking a tool that has good enough UI / UX that even my non-technical friends & family can use but supports incremental backups / snapshots along with detecting + auto correcting data corruption issues.
Does such a thing exist? Who are the big contenders in this space?
This seems to have not always been the case so where did things go wrong with Time Machine? Was there a particular MacOS release that broke everything?
Also what is really the gold standard in terms of backups? On Linux land I never had a great system. All I did was manually copy my drive every 6 months to a few external disks using clonezilla and gparted. This was tedious and not very user friendly.
Recently I learned of ZFS with its CoW approach and support for snapshots & it has piqued my interest. However while it may be a strictly superior way of doing backups its still not very user friendly. I have to budget time to learn it, set it up and of course its absolutely hopeless to expect my non-technical friends/family to figure it out.
Ultimately I'm seeking a tool that has good enough UI / UX that even my non-technical friends & family can use but supports incremental backups / snapshots along with detecting + auto correcting data corruption issues.
Does such a thing exist? Who are the big contenders in this space?
When you hear people complaining about Time Machine you can stop listening once they mention their NAS. Time Machine over the network has never been properly supported and is inherently unsafe.
Time Machine to a local drive connected via USB is great.
If you want to backup over the network you will have to find another solution.
Time Machine to a local drive connected via USB is great.
If you want to backup over the network you will have to find another solution.
Try Time Machine first. As with many things, the complainers are much louder than the people for whom it just works.
I’ve been using it since it came out with plenty of success. The key is to use a USB drive rather than a network drive. If the drive gets corrupted (it’s happened to me a few times over the years, although not in the last several), just wipe it and start a new backup.
I’ve been using it since it came out with plenty of success. The key is to use a USB drive rather than a network drive. If the drive gets corrupted (it’s happened to me a few times over the years, although not in the last several), just wipe it and start a new backup.
Arq (https://www.arqbackup.com/) is a pretty decent backup solution for macOS (and Windows) that lets you bring your own storage. So you can let it back up to Amazon S3/Glacier, Dropbox, your own NAS with ZFS, or one of the other supported destinations.
Use Time Machine over SMB to a ZFS-backed drive. Works great, even remotely. See my longer comment elsewhere in this thread.
I used to have problems with the TM db files becoming corrupted on my NAS, but that hasn't happened in at least five years. I also have a local USB drive connected for alternating backups, but even so the NAS has been fine for quite some time.
Someone said TM was never fully supported over a network, but that's bullshit. Apple used to sell a wifi hotspot with built-in storage called Time Capsule. First party network support is different from third-party NAS support, sure. But the statement was overly broad.
(I also clone nightly to another USB drive, fwiw… And backup to the cloud with Backblaze. And left a drive with a friend last weekend for local offsites. And plan to ship another to a friend in a different geographic region in case of natural disaster. I guess you could say that the stakes are pretty low for my NAS backup, but that doesn't change that it's been solid for a good amount of time.)
Someone said TM was never fully supported over a network, but that's bullshit. Apple used to sell a wifi hotspot with built-in storage called Time Capsule. First party network support is different from third-party NAS support, sure. But the statement was overly broad.
(I also clone nightly to another USB drive, fwiw… And backup to the cloud with Backblaze. And left a drive with a friend last weekend for local offsites. And plan to ship another to a friend in a different geographic region in case of natural disaster. I guess you could say that the stakes are pretty low for my NAS backup, but that doesn't change that it's been solid for a good amount of time.)
I augment Time Machine with Carbon Copy Cloner. Well worth the cost.
There is no other software I have used where the attractive design contrasts so starkly with the broken functionality.
I've used Time Machine for years with a cheap HD hanging off an old Airport Extreme, until today, incidentally.
MacOS had started warning that this approach won't be supported in the future. After upgrading to Tahoe, Time Machine kept saying backup failed, no matter what I did, despite the fact it should still work. Oh well, I'll just delete the old backup and create a new one.
I delete the old backup, click "Add Backup Disk...", select the backup disk, and get blocked with "[Drive] can only be used if it contains existing Time Machine backups for this Mac." It did! You broke them!
UGH.
I thought I'd get another year out of it. Apple in their wisdom has decided otherwise. Now I have no historical or ongoing backups.
Any recs on what to use instead?
MacOS had started warning that this approach won't be supported in the future. After upgrading to Tahoe, Time Machine kept saying backup failed, no matter what I did, despite the fact it should still work. Oh well, I'll just delete the old backup and create a new one.
I delete the old backup, click "Add Backup Disk...", select the backup disk, and get blocked with "[Drive] can only be used if it contains existing Time Machine backups for this Mac." It did! You broke them!
UGH.
I thought I'd get another year out of it. Apple in their wisdom has decided otherwise. Now I have no historical or ongoing backups.
Any recs on what to use instead?
Arq Backup works great on Mac. It has a lot of smart features like only backing up on certain networks, only backing up when external power is connected, etc. You can backup either locally or remote (encrypted then uploaded to your preferred cloud provider, I used BackBlaze B2).
If you prefer free and open source, you can try Vorta (based on Borg Backup which I can also vouch for).
If you prefer free and open source, you can try Vorta (based on Borg Backup which I can also vouch for).
Thanks, I'll check out Arq! I use BackBlaze's backup service too, but want something local.
[deleted]
Carbon Copy Cloner.
There's always rsync or rclone, and cron.
[deleted]
The only time I ever needed catastrophic backup recovery -- thanks to a robbery a dozen years ago -- Time Machine saved me. I bought a new Mac, plugged in the TM drive, told it to migrate, and stepped out for lunch. When I came back, even my browser windows were restored. I was pretty impressed.
I continue to keep a TM running on both my primary machine and my "media server" laptop. Because I'm an old nerd and I have those scars, though, TM is only one part of my backup regime. I also use a cloud provider, plus somewhat regular drive image backups stored in trusted friend's home, plus doing most of my work via a Dropbox account that's replicated across machines. But the front line remains Time Machine.
I used my TM backup last week to migrate into a new Mac. It worked, nearly as I can tell, with 99% fidelity. For SOME reason, some app data in ~/Library wasn't brought over. No idea why, but I suspect it's the weird container folders that are now the default app-data-storage location for most tools (vs., say, just letting the user create a folder in ~/Documents, which I'd prefer).
I continue to keep a TM running on both my primary machine and my "media server" laptop. Because I'm an old nerd and I have those scars, though, TM is only one part of my backup regime. I also use a cloud provider, plus somewhat regular drive image backups stored in trusted friend's home, plus doing most of my work via a Dropbox account that's replicated across machines. But the front line remains Time Machine.
I used my TM backup last week to migrate into a new Mac. It worked, nearly as I can tell, with 99% fidelity. For SOME reason, some app data in ~/Library wasn't brought over. No idea why, but I suspect it's the weird container folders that are now the default app-data-storage location for most tools (vs., say, just letting the user create a folder in ~/Documents, which I'd prefer).
And yet, despite all it's bells and whistles, it hasn't kept up with the times.
Apple introduced "icloud optimized storage" about a decade ago, and Time Machine still doesn't support backing up files that have been offloaded to iCloud.
While you can trigger a file download of files from iCloud, the design of Photos, where it replaces originals with "space optimized versions" means only Apple Photos can download original photos, and Time Machine will just backup a bunch of useless preview files.
i REALLY wish Apple would implement a way in MacOS to download and backup ALL iCloud content, especially given that Apples own recommendations are a bunch of manual steps : https://support.apple.com/en-us/108306
Apple introduced "icloud optimized storage" about a decade ago, and Time Machine still doesn't support backing up files that have been offloaded to iCloud.
While you can trigger a file download of files from iCloud, the design of Photos, where it replaces originals with "space optimized versions" means only Apple Photos can download original photos, and Time Machine will just backup a bunch of useless preview files.
i REALLY wish Apple would implement a way in MacOS to download and backup ALL iCloud content, especially given that Apples own recommendations are a bunch of manual steps : https://support.apple.com/en-us/108306
They need all the human and computing resources to make things translucent and confusing - making useful things that work properly is low priority.
Whenever I've tried to use Time Machine over the network, to a NAS or even to another Mac, it craps out after a few months and says the backups are invalid and asks to start again from scratch.
Advice seems to be 'only use it with external drives' and then every time you plug the drive in it wants the password.
Advice seems to be 'only use it with external drives' and then every time you plug the drive in it wants the password.
For the last several years I've very happily used it over SMB to ZFS (with autosnaps) for this very reason, and wrote an AppleScript to automatically "verify" it every week or so.
Once or twice a year it gives a verify error (i imagine this is because a plug gets pulled halfway through a backup on one side or the other), and I just have to go find the last verified date, zfs rollback, and then re-verify. Afterwards it picks up where I left off, and the historical backups are preserved.
Wish it didn't require this extra effort in the first place, but much better than having to nuke and pave every time.
Even better, it's working great over Tailscale so I can even use it remotely. Only big hiccup I ran into was figuring out some ZFS setting about quota vs refquota (something like that) to have the Time Machine's (artificial) space limit match the ZFS quota so that Time Machine would prune the oldest backups appropriately (otherwise the ZFS snapshots took up an unpredictable amount of space and Time Machine would unexpectedly get out of space errors before hitting its space limit).
Once or twice a year it gives a verify error (i imagine this is because a plug gets pulled halfway through a backup on one side or the other), and I just have to go find the last verified date, zfs rollback, and then re-verify. Afterwards it picks up where I left off, and the historical backups are preserved.
Wish it didn't require this extra effort in the first place, but much better than having to nuke and pave every time.
Even better, it's working great over Tailscale so I can even use it remotely. Only big hiccup I ran into was figuring out some ZFS setting about quota vs refquota (something like that) to have the Time Machine's (artificial) space limit match the ZFS quota so that Time Machine would prune the oldest backups appropriately (otherwise the ZFS snapshots took up an unpredictable amount of space and Time Machine would unexpectedly get out of space errors before hitting its space limit).
I used to get that constantly when I was backing up to a Synology NAS. I switched to an ASUSTOR AsusFlash NAS connecting over SMB and haven't had a single problem since. New NAS is M.2 based and can easily saturate its 10gbe link.
Side note, Synology is dead to me. Synology became consumer hostile with trying to force you to use their drives, they don't have good small scale M.2 options(at least as of last year when I upgraded), and their stuff doesn't even work for me reliably.
Side note, Synology is dead to me. Synology became consumer hostile with trying to force you to use their drives, they don't have good small scale M.2 options(at least as of last year when I upgraded), and their stuff doesn't even work for me reliably.
That would make me lose my mind.
Counter Anecdote: it "just works" for me over SMB, I'm using a Synology DS119+ with a hard quote on 3x my laptops drive size though.
I have run out of disk space on the NAS before though, and that's an annoying pop-up.
Counter Anecdote: it "just works" for me over SMB, I'm using a Synology DS119+ with a hard quote on 3x my laptops drive size though.
I have run out of disk space on the NAS before though, and that's an annoying pop-up.
I’ve been using it on an external drive since it first appeared and I’ve never had to enter a password when I plug my laptop into my desk’s hub.
I wonder if they have considered Time Machine as a kind of private Dropbox, such that some directories are shares between machines, perhaps even remotely. I haven’t owned a Time Machine for at least a decade, but I might be tempted back by something like that.
Time Machine has been rock solid for ten years for my wife, who is an ordinary user.
I use SuperDuper which has also been solid for even longer.
I use SuperDuper which has also been solid for even longer.
i stopped counting how often Time Machine randomly stopped working on my wifes Macbook to our NAS. What a garbage software.
Version 1 of Time Machine was great, you could travel to the past and see how your documents looked like!
Too bad that they never released version 2.
Would have been great to be able to travel into the future and see how your documents would look like.
[deleted]
[deleted]
I wonder if most folks have different expectations from it. Most of the HN crowd are probably already familiar with the usual suspects, so the lack of options and visibility into the process are probably concerns. For most folks, though, I imagine it's turn it on and forget it.