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Comment by _jomo | Hacker News Reader

A couple weeks ago, a macOS update broke and sort of bricked the OS. I wasn't able to fix it, so I decided to restore from a backup, but didn't have access to my Time Machine backups when I discovered you could restore from local APFS snapshots.

The snapshot was restored really fast, but the OS was still broken. I guess APFS snapshots exclude a number of files (as the remote time machine backups do).

It was also when I discovered you can reinstall macOS without losing any data.

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In addition to Time Machine, maintaining a bootable backup (Carbon Copy Cloner or Super Duper) is as, or more important for one reason: A bootable backup can be plugged into any other Mac and booted off in target disk mode to run your backup on any other mac. This remains one of the main reasons I switched away from Windows.

Being able to reinstall MacOS without losing your data can be helpful too.

After the smooth upgrade experience of Sierra (the first in a while), High Sierra has been worth holding off on for folks with existing setups that they depend on.

It's not a bad idea to avoid APFS until it has had time to mature - it's inability to play nice with other non-APFS Macs is too disruptive at the moment when it comes to backups and accessing them, etc.

Highly recommend anyone wanting to try out High Sierra take a full backup before upgrading in case the APFS doesn't play nice with the HFS realities that still may exist in your environment.

"It was also when I discovered you can reinstall macOS without losing any data."

I discovered this as well - nice surprise!

I've switched to (almost) all Win10 boxes at my residence, except for one 2014 15' rMBP. The Windows machines have the freeware 'Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows' connected to an internal 3.5' 1TB drive (or 2.5 500GB drive for the two laptops that had optical drives and were removed and replaced with a 2.5 HDD caddy), that isn't running the OS. The OSS/C:\ is on an SSD.

Finally, the Windows machines are backed up via CloudBerry Labs Desktop Edition to Backblaze B2, in case the house burns down.

(I wish there was a product to remotely store time machine files, but based on the linking structure, I don't think this is possible? Carbon Copy Cloner is nice, but I wish I had incremental images)

I haven’t used TimeMachine in a few years. I kind of figured it was deprecated with iCloud backups.

Obviously there is more functionality with an iCloud backup. But, the overhead of re-configuring my TimeMachine after upgrading from an AirportExtreme seemed pretty onerous.

How are you using it? Through an Airport, plugging in a USB drive, some other method?

As an aside, I tried out Dolly Drive a few years ago (think cloud-based TimeMachine) but I was a bit concerned about having all of my personal info sit in someone else’s hands.

There isn't really an "iCloud backup" on macOS. That's an iOS thing. I'd like to see an iCloud Backup-like thing for Macs, or perhaps an iCloud Time Machine. They seem to have enough trouble getting it to work well on local hardware, though.

I was referring to System Preferences -> iCloud -> iCloud Drive, which backs up my files.

Though, in addition, I'm a pretty big utilizer of the ecosystem: iCloud Music Library, Photos, etc.

> I haven’t used TimeMachine in a few years. I kind of figured it was deprecated with iCloud backups.

Wat?

Time Machine is for backing up a macOS machine incrementally to local/local network storage.

iCloud Backup is for backing up iOS devices to remote storage.

There is zero overlap between these tools.

Nah, read my other comment. On the Mac it's called iCloud Drive. It backs up your home directory, with exceptions you allow for.

I have a dotfiles git repo I use, in addition to personal repos I check into.

I'm not sure what I'm missing (I don't spend a lot of time messing around with manual configurations that aren't checked into my dotfiles git repo).

iCloud drive isn't a backup service. Its a file sync service. Sync != Backup.

AFAIK APFS's snapshots will snapshot the whole drive, so it shouldn't exclude anything.

So I thought, but the restore not fixing the issue made me think.

Did the reinstall fix the issue? Since the reinstall preserves user data, is there any chance of malware re-inserting itself after the OS has been reinstalled?

Yes, a reinstall fixed it. And yes, persistent malware should be possible (unless you format your disk).

Or if the malware lives in the disk controller firmware in which case even formatting the disk won't help.

Is the "Firmware Restoration CD" sufficient to reset firmware to a known-good state?

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201692

I'm curious how SIP interacts with this. It's possible that the restore avoids touching anything protected by SIP. Though I hope not because then you wouldn't be able to snapshot before an OS upgrade and roll back if the OS upgrade is problematic.

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