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Comment by Ididntdothis | Hacker News Reader

I was really impressed when I got a new MacBook this year. With my previous Windows machines it was always one or two days of reinstalling everything and then a few more weeks until I had all my settings back. With the Mac I restored from Time Machine and after a few hours I had my machine back pretty much the way it was before with just a few settings missing. That alone is worth a certain premium to me.

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I have had Time Machine fail on me when I tried to restore from a backup on the network that was not unmounted properly. It would not let me get to it in any way, and trying to debug the issue from public forums was impossible. In the end I gave up on it as most important files were backed up separately.

Now I'm using Carbon Copy Cloner [0]. It has the same ease of use as Time Machine, it gives you bootable backups and it has the best documentation I have ever come across. Pretty much every possible use case and error case is described with workarounds.

Time Machine is great when it works, but when it doesn't it turns into an absolute nightmare. Also it gives you very little insight into what it is doing or what state it is in.

PS: I'm not affiliated with CCC. Just a very happy user who got bitten by Time Machine too many times.

[0] https://bombich.com/

I don't mind premium and what you(me too) observe with windows is a bad architectural decisions of Microsoft allowing every app to pollute it's shit all over the places - registry, system dirs, user/* and tons of other obscure places where app could spread leftovers all over.

This makes it nightmare to manage anything.

Mac ecosystem is cleaner and more tighly controlled.

With Windows - it's a business opportunity for someone to plug Microsoft holes and come up with easy migration/restore service.

Yeah... Mac is so clean that's why everything regarding transferring devices is such a PITA. It takes hours to figure out the arcane undocumented ways to fix whatever's broken on a Mac because they internationally hide or break their own devices. Seriously you can't even replace hard drives anymore on a Mac. Here's a fun one, try transferring family sharing to a new owner because say the previous owner died without losing everything. Try moving a child without access to the previous owners device, or even dropping the child from family sharing. Everything iOS user management related just plain sucks. I'm glad they're finally fixing the hot mess that is iTunes. Working on iOS or Mac is closer to bring a techpriest than a techie, understand nothing just chant the magic words. Give me Windows or Arch Linux any day of the week. I'm actually pretty sad the Ubuntu phone stopped being developed.

I can see how the Mac is not all golden but I still think it’s much better than windows.

I remember even in the 90s realizing that the registry was a bad idea. Instead each app should have had its own executable/settings/data folder. I don't understand why they didn't add this.

Exactly. Each app should have it's own directory. It shouldn't pollute outside. Problem solved.

Ballmer thought differently. Or most likely didn't think at all.

I wouldn't blame it on Ballmer. All these decisions were made when Gates was in control. the designers of NT and windows 95 had a chance to clean up and didn't do it.

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